Learn web development to deploy a real app in nine months
Nine months of serious daily work — about an hour a day, every day — gets a complete beginner from no code to a deployed full-stack web app on a public URL. Roughly 270 hours total. You will not be employable on the strength of this alone. You will be ready to keep going.
9 months · ~270 hours · deploy a working full-stack app to a public domain
1.The Odin Project — Foundations
The Odin Project is the consensus self-taught full-stack curriculum and the Foundations course is its first hundred-or-so hours. You install a real Linux-style development environment, learn HTML and CSS by building actual layouts, learn enough JavaScript to make a calculator and a tic-tac-toe game, and learn Git the way working developers use it. It is free, current, and run by a committee of working engineers. Do every project.
Free
Odin Foundations →2.The Odin Project — Full Stack JavaScript
Continue with the Full Stack JavaScript path: deeper JavaScript, React, Node.js, Express, and PostgreSQL. The projects get long and lonely here — a full battleship game, a CV generator, an Instagram-style backend with auth. This is where most people quit. The trick is not to skip projects: a tutorial-watched is forgotten, a project-shipped is remembered. Use the Discord when you get stuck for more than an hour.
Free
Odin Full Stack JavaScript →3.Ship one app you didn't follow a tutorial for
Pick a project that no Odin lesson taught you — a personal habit tracker, a recipe site for your family, a small SaaS tool — and build it from a blank repo. Deploy it to a real URL using Render, Fly.io, or Railway. Write a README. The point is to prove to yourself that you can start from nothing and arrive at something on the open internet, because that is the whole job.
Free–$10/month for hosting
Fly.io launch guide →If this doesn't fit you
If you already write code and want a more rigorous, more compressed curriculum focused entirely on the modern React/Node stack, do the University of Helsinki's Full Stack Open instead. It is free, fully online, granted real ECTS credit, and far more demanding per hour than Odin. It assumes you can program already.
Why this path
The web-development beginner space is full of $15,000 bootcamps and $300 Udemy mega-courses, almost all of which underperform a free curriculum maintained by working developers. The Odin Project is opinionated, project-heavy, and brutal in the right way — it will not coddle you, and the projects are gates you must actually pass through. Skipping the final solo project is the most common mistake. Do it whether you feel ready or not.