I did all the FCC certs back when there was only 3, and found I learned a ton of extremely useful practical skills that was eventually crucial in finding a job. However, I still feel like there are some computer science fundamentals I’m missing, especially if I wanted my career to be more focused on back-end development / not necessarily based on the web.
I’ve seen the p1xt guides, but I think ideally what I’d want is sort of in between the “Computer Science and Backend Development - Java Focus” and “Computer Science and Web Development - comprehensive”. Or I thought it might be useful to do an intro CS course online (e.g. CS 101) just to take better stock of what I don’t know.
What do you all think? Is it reasonable to just combine those two paths and remove everything that mentions java in particular or the web? Do I have a weird illusion of language/platform agnostic CS knowledge that don’t actually exist?
Those are great guides but they aren’t the gospel. There are many paths to becoming a dev and many different combinations of tech. And what you end up doing probably won’t be exactly what you study anyway. Just keep learning and building things. That is the most important thing.
I usually recommend the Teach Yourself Computer Science site for those that want to jump into CS. It is very in depth and covers a lot of subjects. If you went over everything in this, I’d say you have a pretty good understanding of CS in general. Even if you skimmed over the material, you’d still get a lot out of all the resources 
I would also say, if you just learned 2 languages (say Java and Python for example) and learned core CS concepts, like data structures, you would get a very language/platform agnostic view.
Theory is something that is hard to know “if you know” without finding courses on it and taking them yourself to see what you really know. Its definitely one of those things that will always help you day to day and over the course of your programming career 
PS. I have a computer science degree, and found that you spend probably 20% of the time learning actually how to program, for better or worse. The rest of the stuff you end up learning is more theory, technical, and mathematical concepts. Most of the theory doesn’t help day to day, but some of it is damn critical in some cases.
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