The Boot.dev Beat. April 2023

We released more this last March than I think we’ve ever released in a single month before. I’ve been biting my nails waiting to share it all in this month’s newsletter.

All the best, Lane

Patch notes

1. “Learn Web Servers” course released

This is our new flagship back-end programming course. If you’re following along the back-end career path, you’ll take this course after you learn the Go programming language. In this one, you’ll build a fully-fledged web server in Go from scratch (look ma, no frameworks!)

2. “Build a Blog Aggregator” project released

To accompany the new web servers course, I replaced our old “build a social media back-end” project with this blog (rss) aggregator! This project comes in the learning path directly after you learn SQL. You’ll use your newfound database skills to integrate a production-grade PostgreSQL database into a back-end service that collects blog posts from the internet.

3. Boots: The Bear the Explains Code

This month we plugged the new GPT AI into Boot.dev! You can highlight any code in the platform and ask Boots, our new mascot, to explain what the code does to you in plain English.

4. New Challenges for “Learn OOP” course

Challenges continue to be one of the favorite features on Boot.dev! We now have optional end-of-chapter challenges for “Learn Python” and “Learn OOP”!

What is yet to come

• Challenges for “Learn Algorithms”. We’ll continue working our way up the learning path adding more and more optional challenges to the end of each chapter.
• More videos for the “Learn Go” course. We’re collaborating with FreeCodeCamp to create a video walkthrough of our course on their YouTube channel.
• A new design update. We’ll be adding new roles (e.g. scholar, mage, sage, etc) and we’ve hired a freelance designer to help us further improve the look and feel of Boot.dev.

The cream of the crop

(Video) Discord Stores BILLIONS of messages using this database

by Coding with Lewis

This video is awesome, even though it’s a bit outdated now that Discord has further migrated to ScyllaDB. I’d still recommend watching it though, the explanation of the decisions made by the Discord engineers is evergreen.

(Interview) Why Should Web Developers Care About Logging?

by Learn with Jason

Jason interviews Mat Wilk about logging. As a back-end developer logging is super important, and this is a great explanation of why that is. The go into some strategies you can employ to write code that has has more effective logging so that your debugging is so much easier.

(Video) Exposing Astro: Between Two Nerds

by SST

Astro is a front-end framework, but that’s not the point. This is just hilarious tech YouTube humor that split my side. We need more of this hilarity.

Shameless plugs

(Article) It’s Not About the Job Openings

by Lane Wagner

(Video) How Do Golang Servers Stack up Against Python and Node.js?

by Lane Wagner