Menu and Timer/threaded functions

You may find that unless you adopt the habit early, your code will fail in strange and unexpected ways.
The usual clues are forum posts with titles like "weird crash" or "sketch keeps repeating setup".
Menus often grow quickly, and what seemed to work a couple of iterations ago now fails, in seemingly unrelated areas.

To your question 1), the answer is, as always, look at the blink without delay example in the IDE.