How I Got My First Client Midway Through The Odin Project

Hey everyone! Today I want to share how I managed to land my very first client while still working through The Odin Project.

A few weeks ago, right after finishing the Ruby section and starting on HTML and CSS, my friend gave me a call. He recently kicked off a business making custom horse stables, and as we were chatting, he mentioned a pretty annoying problem they were having.

Basically, customers could choose different styles of stable fronts and dividers, think silver, gold, or bronze. Each one needed customizable middle panels, either made from softwood or plastic, to prevent horses from kicking the metal. Every choice changed the pricing, and right now, my friend’s system was pretty manual. He’d measure everything, talk to the customer in person or over the phone, then crunch numbers using a PDF. Honestly, it sounded exhausting.

Without giving it a second thought, I told him I could whip up an app to handle all this in similar manner to an online store. He sounded thrilled, so I asked him to shoot over all the data, promising I’d get right on it. And just like that, I had my first client before even finishing Odin.

Fresh off the Chess project, I felt pretty confident about handling classes and objects, so this new challenge seemed straightforward enough. I started dedicating about an hour each evening, and within a week, I’d built a fully working console version.

While building the console version, I naturally started thinking about deploying it somewhere online with a proper UI. But I quickly realized deployment was part of The Odin Project that I hadn’t reached yet. I did some Googling, hoping there might be a quick way to deploy just a Ruby app, but no luck. Rails was the way to go.

Luckily, my friend and I go way back, so I just asked him to use this console version through a simple workaround (like running it locally) for now, until I caught up in Odin and could properly tie everything together with HTML, CSS, and Rails. Of course, I could’ve jumped ahead and figured out deployment and UI design myself, but honestly, I preferred doing things Odin’s way. Trying to unlearn something done incorrectly is such a headache. Maybe I’m being a bit too cautious, but I figured skipping ahead would just mean extra refactoring later. Plus, my friend’s business is still new enough that taking orders over the phone isn’t a huge issue right now.

For me, it’s a win-win. Once I finish The Odin Project, I’ll have a fully polished app to add to my portfolio. Who knows, perhaps my friend will even recommend me to someone else. That’d be pretty sweet, right?