Why I Started The Odin Project and You Should Too.

What is The Odin Project?

If I were to quote directly from their website, it would be something that goes,

The Odin Project is one of those "What I wish I had when I was learning" resources. Not everyone has access to a computer science education or the funds to attend an intensive coding school and neither of those is right for everyone anyway. This project is designed to fill in the gap for people who are trying to hack it on their own but still want a high quality education.

Whereas if I were to have a short introduction to their service, it would be in a sentence,

The Odin Project is for the developers that lost their track due to overabundance of resources.

Why The Odin Project?

TOP (The Odin Project) is not the only curriculum out there. There are lots more like FreeCodeCamp, CodeAcademy, SoloLearn, etc. But the reason TOP stands out from the others is that they give you a much more practical and hands on experience with the Developer Workflow early on which gives you a taste of what you're getting yourself into.

Unlike the other sites, TOP doesn't just start teaching you languages or technologies, but their entire introduction section is just what being a developer is and how it's going to affect your life.

One of the most inspiring blog post that I've read in my life comes from their introduction page.

Knowing what you'll be doing once you get into the industry helps a lot in setting the proper mindset which I really didn't see any other platforms emphasize on.

How's The Odin Project?

It's time to talk about how it is to work with TOP. Like I mentioned before, TOP takes a different approach to learning that is similar to how you'd learn while working for real.

They don't just have a bunch of lessons that you just code and speed-run through and get a certificate at the end. No, they don't quite do that. What they will do is introduce you to a topic, have links to several articles about them and have you practice them. What this does is builds up that habit of reading documentation and picking out the important information you need.

And after you're done with gathering the information you need, they have questions that you should be able to answer at the end to assess your understanding on that topic.

I really found this useful as I would often just read documentation and forget what I learnt immediately after. Sitting there trying to properly answer the questions really helped me in solidifying my knowledge.

The most important thing to take away from TOP is the projects that you build while going through the curriculum. There are a bunch of them and each challenge you in a different set of ways. You'll constantly keep finding new and interesting things to make something work and TOP really gives you the chance to do that.

Overall, the close to real world experience with coding, the well structured curriculum and the projects built are what makes TOP so great.

On top of all this, The Odin Project is an Open Source initiative and one of their mottos is,

By the developers, for the developers.

Why You Should Use It Too

All this time I was explaining why TOP is so great and all, but I never really touched on why some of you should use it too.

Once I was a lost developer too. I didn't know where to learn things from and there were just too many options to choose from. With the little knowledge I had, I went and did many of the platforms mentioned before, but none of them clicked with me.

TOP came in at a time where I lacked motivation, a clear path and the most of all, support. TOP greatly focuses on why community support is important and their Discord server really shows how powerful it can be when you can have someone guide you through.

One thing needs to be kept in mind no matter if you choose TOP or not is that, you need to be consistent. A great resource like TOP would mean nothing if you're not consistent enough. There's a proverb that goes,

Consistency is key.

I'm a strong believer in that and you need to be too if you want to make any progress in this industry.

Conclusion

Learning to code is a journey that can have too many roads to follow. Some are bad, some are good but, what really matters is if you choose to see the end of it. TOP is one of those resources and I'll say it might not be for you. But if you are willing to commit to something, TOP will give you the 'missing puzzle piece' which you might just be needing.

Resources

• TheOdinProject

Socials

• GitHub
• Twitter
• Discord