For #2 -- I would suggest looking at the job descriptions of roles you might want to have or apply for, one day. Do they list certifications? If so, which ones?

For #2 -- I would suggest looking at the job descriptions of roles you might want to have or apply for, one day. Do they list certifications? If so, which ones? I generally find a lot of certifications are pretty useless -- hard to tell if people learned anything, retained anything, or can apply anything. A few folks here mentioned GitHub and open source projects. If you build something small/cool and demo it via an open source repo, then you prove that you can learn, code, build, and ship. Way better/cooler than a certificate IMHO.