The Boot.dev Beat. October 2023
Last published October 1, 2023
Happy All Hallow’s Eve. I hope you enjoy this month’s cover art. It might be my favorite so far.
All the best, Lane
Patch notes
1. New Learn to Get a Job Course
I’ve been slowly building this course in the shadows for awhile, collecting all the best job search advice from coworkers, hiring managers, and even my podcast guests. This is an info course that will guide you through the process of creating a portfolio or projects, resume, GitHub profile, etc. I even talk about the best ways to source job opportunities, and how to prepare for interviews.
The course is in private beta at the moment! It will be fully released this week. If you’d like early access (realize there might be some rough edges) you can use the link above.
2. Big updates to Boots
Boots, our amazing in-app AI mentor has undergone some serious improvements. They include:
- GPT 4 instead of GPT 3.5
- He now uses the Socratic teaching method to help you solve problems instead of just giving you the answer
- Chat-first, meaning you now just strike up a conversation instead of highlighting code
- One-click button to include your code in the chat
3. New notification system
We added a bell icon to the top left of the screen where all your quest completions, course completions, and achievements will be shown. We’ll be iterating on that UI in the coming months. Our goal is to make the notifications less obtrusive (a modal used to popup in your face), but also make sure you don’t miss anything.
What is yet to come
- Working on a new style of explainer videos
- New “Learn Kubernetes” course
- Challenges and reworking of the “Learn JavaScript” course
- Updates to make sharpshooter less painful and more rewarding
- Plans for a new “unit test” assignment type
Backend Banter Podcast
We created a new trailer for the podcast. You know, so you can share it with your friends.
This month’s episodes include:
- #020 - Running SQLite on the Edge with Pekka Enberg
- #019 - Full-time vs Freelancing vs Starting a Company with Rob Walling
- #018 - Data Engineering for Gophers with Miriah Peterson
- #017 - Writing Go at Multi-Million Dollar Companies with Mat Ryer
Be sure to subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice! And leave a rating & review if you really want to help us out.
The cream of the crop
(Article) Raspberry Pi 5 is coming
by RaspberryPi
In some ways I owe my early career to Raspberry Pi. My first job was writing low level scripts on a Raspberry Pi that interacted with hardware sensors and pushed data to a web server. That was with a Pi 2 and Pi 3, and now the 5 is being released! If you’re interested in building software projects that interact with the real world, I highly recommend looking into the Raspberry Pi.
(Video) The TRUTH About Golang Backend Frameworks
by Melkey
I clicked on this video in my YouTube feed expecting to disagree with Melkey because I have strong opinions about web frameworks in Go, but we are on the same page for the most part! In a nutshell, you don’t need a heavy handed web framework with an ORM and all that, and there a bunch of lightweight routing libraries that do a great job in Go. Give this one a watch.
(Article) Learn to Code the Slow Way
by Lane Wagner
Yeah, yeah, it’s my article. But this is my newsletter so I can plug my own stuff if I want. I had a lot fo fun writing this one, because this topic has been on my mind a lot recently. In a nutshell, coding is hard and if you wanna succeed you need to be prepared to take the longer road, there aren’t any shortcuts.
Related Articles
The Boot.dev Beat. September 2023
Aug 31, 2023 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
The best part of working on Boot.dev is seeing you all make almost unbelievable strides in not only your understanding of fundamental concepts, but what you can now build from scratch. It’s not just that, I’ve been hearing a lot of stories about the confidence that’s being gained by our alumnis after shipping so much code. That’s a critical part of the journey.
The Boot.dev Beat. August 2023
Jul 28, 2023 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
As I’m writing this on July 28th, we’ve had 118,984 lessons successfully completed by students on Boot.dev so far this July. This marks the first time we’ve had over 100k lessons completed in a month. While I’m ecstatic that we’ve been able to join you in so many of your learning journeys, I just want to emphasize that it’s your journey. We’re here to provide the best resources and experience that we can, but you deserve every ounce of credit for your hard work. Keep it up friends.
The Boot.dev Beat. July 2023
Jun 26, 2023 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
June was hot. I got sunburned. What else happened… Oh yeah, I finished the new CI/CD course! It’s slated to launch on July 10th, so watch out for that. We also are in the process of hiring a new Boot.dev team member to help us build harder better faster and stronger.
The Boot.dev Beat. June 2023
May 31, 2023 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
May was a historic month for Boot.dev. We added more students to the backend learning path than we ever have in a single month before, and we’re doing everything we can to build and release new, better courses at a faster clip. Thanks for hanging out and learning with us.