Sneaking into front-end dev from the world of analytics

I started coding professionally with a pretty typical analytics “stack” of SQL and originally SAS and then python. Prior to that I tried to learn web development by using a program from Microsoft called FrontPage (I’m dating myself); it did not go well. If I remember correctly I was able to publish a couple of sites, which were made up of pre-teen / teen nonsense, but they were static and I did not learn very much from the highly proprietary software except a bit of HTML.

Fast forward to today and I believe I have enough capability to build some interesting analytics / functionality and want to be able to do some front-end development for both informational and commercial reasons.

Enter The Odin Project… an open-source web development program with the goal or preparing individuals for a career in web development. The program is structured into a set of “Foundations” courses which everyone takes and then it branches into a Ruby-based or a JavaScript-based curriculum. There is also a Discord channel with a number of people willing to offer help in a Stack Overflow-like engagement.

I started the Foundations courses a week or so back and have worked my way through about half of them. The program really starts from the ground up including setting up an IDE / text editor as well as Git/GitHub and then starts to go into HTML and CSS development. Finally, the Foundations closes with a section on Flexbox and JavaScript.

I have just started the CSS portion and have found the courses really well structured and informative. Even the things that seem remedial on the surface have highlighted ways for me to improve my fundamentals. The highlights for me are:

• Defaulting my git commits to open VS Code and give me the opportunity to write a multi-line commit message (which the course also challenges you to write better commit messages :))
• Putting together a static HTML-based site with a couple of recipes that can be accessed via GitHub

I will provide another update on the total Foundations program when I have completed it, but if you are starting from square one or reasonably close to it The Odin Project seems like a great place to start.