Today the Education team at Apollo GraphQL launched our new learning platform, Odyssey! If you've ever wanted to learn more about GraphQL or Apollo, we've got you covered with video lessons, quizzes, and interactive code challenges. Got an idea for a course? Let us know on Twitter!

Trevor Blades, Raph Terrier, Michelle Mabuyo, Stephen Barlow, and I have been hard at work the past few months and are super excited to finally share Odyssey with the world! With Raph managing both the engineering and curriculum development, he developed the first course, along with Michelle and Stephen. Meanwhile, Trevor and I built the platform itself, with some contributions from Raph along the way. Don't ask me how Raph did all of that on top of his other manager duties. The guy is incredible.

I won't spoil too much here, so check out Odyssey and my post on the Apollo blog to see for yourself! And stay tuned: we're planning on a mini blog series going more in-depth about Odyssey and how we built it!

I joined Apollo just over 2 months ago on November 23, 2020. After some onboarding the first week, I jumped in head first working on Odyssey with Trevor. No really. It's almost entirely the only thing I've worked on since I started. And I've LOVED it.

I found myself INCREDIBLY grateful that I came in with some prior experience working with Gatsby and MDX. Even the styling library we used, Chakra UI, is pretty similar to the library, Theme UI, that I had been using more recently. And even better, Chakra UI has Framer Motion as a dependency, which I had been playing around with on my own. Odyssey is built with all of these tools I was already a bit familiar with, which really helped me be able to start making contributions early on. And it helped reduce the stress and nerves of starting a new job 😅

My teammates are amazing to work with. Pair programming with Trevor always teaches me new things, from keyboard shortcuts to JavaScript methods to different ways of thinking and approaching solving a problem. And I've always felt that my opinion is valued and that my ideas aren't worth any less just because I'm new. It's been a breath of fresh air coming from the stress of a bootcamp to a work environment where I feel trusted to do my work and where I get to work on fun, challenging projects with people I enjoy working with. I can't wait to see what the future holds!