About 2 months ago I learned about Free Code Camp and it certainly is a great resource, so I spend quite some time working through to the excersises (I skipped HTML & CSS for the most part). The lessons are divided into simple to solve exercises and including a projects from time to time which I honestly quite enjoyed a lot especially the weather API project, I have mine on CodePen. I really like the whole community on Twitter (especially the #100DaysOfCode) and the Medium Blog posts.

About 1 week ago I read a Medium post about learning Web Developement and I that is when I saw The Odin Project. At first I didn’t want to start their curriculum until I workedthorugh the Free Code Camp lessons but as I started to read the first Web Development 101 lessons I quickly noticed a very different approach.

I don’t want to sound cocky but I know some Web Developement but I know that I’m far from being a good Web Developer, I started learning Ruby and Rails about 1 year ago and I started a small social media site which has now about 140k users so I had to work quite a lot with HTML, CSS, Javascript and of course Ruby. I do have to add that a lot of the code I wrote isn’t exactly efficient nor clean but at the time I had little to no idea what that was. I just wanted to get started and learning what I had to learn along the way. My point in all this is that I’m not 100% new to web developement and all I can say is that if I had learned about The Odin Project a lot of my code would have been much cleaner right now.

The way the odin project structured their curriculum is very detailed. You certainly learn the things you have to learn in the right order and with increasing degree of difficulty. You will have to use what you learned in previous lessons in the upcoming lessons and the curriculum relies heavily on you reading the documentation, blog posts, etc.

You are responsible for learning the content, The Odin Project DOES NOT teach you the content YOU DO. The Odin Project just shows you what to read.

Why this is important

Probably the most important aspect of all this, is that you are learning Web Development in the same way a professional would, which is by reading official documentation, blog posts and watching videos. Unlike sites like Codecademy and Khan academy which are great but they feed you the information. The approach is crucial to become self sufficient:

Getting Feeded: Here is (A) and (B) now build (AB). Self sufficient: Here is where you find more about (A) and (B) now build (C)

In The Odin Project you will get links to various sites and learn everything on your own in a structured way. After you learned it, you will get a project where you have to apply what you learned to solve the project. Similar to the project you get from Free Code Camp which is why I like that site as well.

For example:

• You learn HTML & CSS then you build a clone of the Google Search homepage
• You learn Javascript then you build a rock, paper, scissor game
• You learn about DOM manipulation then you create a Graphical User Interface.

Once again, unlike other sites, you don’t get step to step instructions. You rather get a set of requirements that you have to meet in your project. This makes a lot of sense because in a real life work environment, the client will not tell you step by step what to do. The client will tell you I want Product (A) to have (X), (Y) and (Z) capabilities. It is up to you to meet those requirements and find your own solution and that is exactly what The The Odin Project and Free Code Camp require you to do. As a bonus, The Odin Project also encourages you to contribute to their open source Github projects which teaches you how to contribute with others. You will learn how to use Github with several developers contributing at the same time. You will have to use things such as upstream pulls and forks. Those are things that are somewhat hard to do when you are learning on your own.

Finally, you publish your projects using Github Pages, currently I’m publishing mine there as well just like this blog but on a different subpath: My Projects