Day 1: Starting the Odin Project

Today I started the Odin Project with the Foundations course. I completed about 10 percent of it today, which is the Introduction. I will go over what I learned today and how the experience has been.

What is the Odin Project?

The Odin Project is an open-source community and course that teaches you to code through hands-on experience, otherwise known as project-based learning. It pulls some of the best resources on the internet to teach you how to code completely for free. It works by giving you the resources and then throwing you in the deep end to find out how to make them work and gain an understanding.

Introduction to Web Development

In this section of the Introduction, they provide you with what web development is. What I got is that web development is the creating and maintaining of a website. Pretty simple. They go over what web developers do depending on the route they choose. There are three: Front End, Back End, and Full Stack. The front end handles creating the look and the functionality of the website. The back end handles the data and provides the front end with what it needs, basically the guts of the website according to the Odin Project. Full Stack developers are able to do both Front End and Back End. This is the main goal of the Odin Project for me. It goes over tools that I'm going to be using, like GitHub, IDE, and Google, to name some.

Motivation and Mindset

This section talks about how motivation plays a role in making sure you progress and stay consistent. It's really what gets you started and propels you forward. Essentially, having a goal will serve as your motivation to keep you going when you have those days when you don't believe in your ability or have a will to continue because it's too hard. It also talks about growth mindset and how to think while learning to code. A growth mindset is the idea that with grit and consistency you can learn and become good at anything, compared to a fixed mindset where you think you're either good at something or not. It also goes over managing your study time by setting an uninterrupted part of your day to actually learning and what to do when you're stuck, like searching things up and finding a solution either from talking to the community or doing it on your own. It really preaches not getting discouraged and not comparing yourself to others. A big thing as well is taking breaks, even very small ones like 30 seconds, to capture the information and long breaks to let your brain rest because it's like a muscle.

Asking for Help

The course teaches you how to properly ask for help. It runs you through some scenarios like the "XY Problem" and "Don't ask to ask, just ask" and a guide on asking technical questions. All of this essentially just teaches you to try to figure out what you need help with to the very most detail and describing it to others or yourself to not waste time or divert to a point that you're not actually needing to get help with. Essentially, it teaches you how to ask clear questions to get the best help without wasting anyone's time.

Join the Odin Community

This is the last section of the Introduction and it teaches you how to join their Discord and ways you can connect with others in the space. It's awesome because it helps you make connections and get through problems when you're feeling really down and don't know where else to go. It provides some assignments like creating a GitHub account and joining their Discord server.

That's what I learned with the Odin Project today. If you enjoyed this article, please leave a like and a follow. I will be documenting my progress every day.