I'm in my first full-time coding position post grad school and I've been here about a year. My three-pronged career strategy is, at the moment:

1. Build a personal brand. I've got a Twitter, dev.to, LinkedIn, GitHub, and website with the handle awwsmm. I'm posting more here and on Twitter. I'm trying to get my name out.

2. Get certified. I don't have a degree in C.S., so I'm trying to add some "legitimacy" to my CV by taking a course in advanced Java and getting Oracle certified. After that, I'm thinking of getting certified in SQL or Apache Hadoop/ Spark.

3. Build a portfolio. I did a ton of C/C++ coding in graduate school, but unfortunately I didn't keep a record of much of it at all. I'm trying to document more of my recent work here and on GitHub.

If you're also new, what challenges have you faced early on? Have you gotten any really good advice from more senior developers? Why did you choose your particular language or framework?

If you're more experienced, what advice do you have for me? What languages are worth learning now? How important are certifications? What do you look for when hiring new developers? What do you think of my approach?

Any advice at all would be appreciated!