47 Certificates and a To-Do List
"I spent a Sunday organizing my entire credential history and building a roadmap for everything I plan to get before December."
I have two physical folders full of certifications. Around 70 of them. Academic competitions, special courses, programs I completed when I was younger — back when collecting certificates felt like collecting cards, before I understood what any of them were actually for.
Most of them are not going on my portfolio.
Today I spent a few hours doing something I should have done a while ago — going through everything, deciding what was worth displaying, and writing descriptions for each one that actually said something. Not the kind of descriptions that sound like they were generated by someone trying to describe a certification they have never seen. The kind that are honest about what a thing is and how hard or easy it was to get.
Some of what I decided: the YES Program certificate stays, because it is the U.S. Department of State and that carries weight regardless of what else is on the page. The C1 English CEFR stays, because C1 is genuinely useful internationally in a way B2 is not. The J-Coders courses stay, because they are Cognia-accredited and Cognia is an organization that operates across a hundred countries — which matters when you are applying to things internationally and nobody has heard of J-Coders Academy. A certificate of appreciation for attending an event does not stay. That is not a certification. That is a thank-you note.
I also finished the Claude 101 certification today — Anthropic's official one, through Skilljar. It is not a hard course. If you have been using Claude seriously for any amount of time, most of it will be things you already do. But it is the official Anthropic credential, it was required for the Claude Corps fellowship I had been looking into, and it takes a few hours at most. The two other courses I signed up for — Claude Code in Action and AIFluency — are still in progress. Same logic applies to those: not because I need to learn the material, but because having the credential from the company that builds the tool is a different kind of signal than just knowing how to use it.
The more interesting part of today was building the list of certifications I plan to complete before December.
I ended up with 42, across categories that probably say more about what I actually care about than any resume would. The CS50 suite from Harvard — five of them, all genuinely free including the certificate, no paywall. The entire freeCodeCamp track for things I already know but want formally documented. Two cryptography courses, one from Stanford taught by Dan Boneh, which is about as close as you can get to a real academic credential in that space without paying tuition. Cisco cybersecurity. LangChain Academy for agent development. HubSpot for SEO and content, because I run a blog and a portfolio and I might as well understand how that side of things works. Philosophy from Edinburgh. Mythology from Penn. A neuroscience series that builds on something I started years ago at a program called Brain Camp. MoMA art history, which I included partly because I genuinely want it and partly because not many people have a MoMA certificate sitting next to their GitHub stats.
The cryptography ones are the ones I am most looking forward to. I have been interested in that space for a long time — the kind of interest that starts with things like Cicada 3301 and goes from there. The Stanford course covers RSA, modular arithmetic, digital signatures, authenticated encryption. The mathematical foundations of the exact puzzles I used to spend hours on. That one I will not be skimming.
The goal before December is not to have finished all 42. The goal is to have made a real dent — to have the Harvard certs done, the cryptography done, and enough of the rest that the portfolio section does not look like a wish list.
I have always collected things. Books. Certifications. Names with histories behind them. It is not hoarding if you actually read them.
The certification list is available on the portfolio if you want to see the full breakdown — what is genuinely free, what is free to learn but costs to certify, and what is worth paying for anyway.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oVE6IqupguQkcCrCevcZ2YsiCJHOlSqy/view?usp=sharing