The Boot.dev Beat. December 2023

Hope you had a splendid Turkey month. My wife, two kids, and I spent Thanksgiving in southern Utah. The fresh air was nice, AQI here in Northern Utah is 100+ right now… wouldn’t recommend. Anyway, back to coding.

Regards, Lane

Patch notes

1. New Kubernetes Course

I’ve been mentioning this course for a while now, but it’s finally live! We’ve gone through alpha and beta testing (thanks to all our students who helped test!), and now the course is ready for you. It’s a deeply interactive course where you use minikube and kubectl on your local machine to deploy a microservices system. Chapters include:

1. Install
2. Pods
3. Deployments
4. ConfigMaps
5. Services
6. Ingress
7. Storage
8. Namespaces
9. Scaling
10. Nodes

2. Team Plans

We’ve made it really easy for your company to pay for your Boot.dev membership (and memberships for your team). Once you’re logged in, navigate to the teams tab and follow the instructions. Teams on Boot.dev work nearly identically to teams on GitHub:

• Your manager can create a free account to manage billing themselves
• You can join and leave teams at will with your personal Boot.dev account
• Your personal progress will stay with you even if you leave the team

If you have any issues with team billing, let us know and we can help.

3. Sharpshooter Sprees

Look, we heard you: sharpshooter was frustrating. Nothing feels worse than losing a 100+ sharpshooter on a single typo. So we’ve made some changes:

1. You can now earn “sprees” by getting 15 lessons correct in a row.
2. When you miss a lesson, you lose your current spree, but you don’t lose your previous sprees.
3. You now earn sharpshooter achievements by accumulating sprees.

This new system is designed to keep the fun pressure of “get it right the first time” while not being as punishing. We hope you like it.

What is yet to come

• Smoothing out some of the difficulty spikes in the “Learn Python” course
• Challenges and reworking of the “Learn JavaScript” course
• Challenges for the SQL course
• Lore for Boots

Backend Banter Podcast

This month’s episodes include:

• #029 - Write Laravel, not PHP (feat. Aaron Francis)
• #028 - Learning Go: A Discussion of the Language with the Author, Jon Bodner
• #027 - 2023 vs 2001 Tech Recessions and Distributed Systems with Russ Ross
• #026 - Why PubSub Architectures are Still Cool with Byron Ruth and David Gee

The price of the podcast is a subscription on YouTube or in your podcast player of choice. I appreciate you.

The cream of the crop

(Short) Mac Support

by Pirate Software

Thor from Pirate Software has become a hero of mine. I played a lot of StarCraft 2 in my teens, and I recently learned this guy not only worked on the game but now streams on Twitch about software dev (game dev to be specific). Anyhow, I don’t normally link such short-form content in these newsletters, but I just wanted to introduce you all to Thor.

(Article) Rust std fs slower than Python!? No, it’s hardware!

by Xuanwo

This was a fun little read I found on Hacker News. The author is scared thinking they’ve found an instance where Python seems to be much faster than Rust. They show how they dug into the problem, to find the real issue. It’s a fun read, and a good reminder that performance is a complicated topic, and its almost never as simple as “language X is faster than language Y”.

(Site) Advent of Code

Every year advent of code comes around. It’s a fantastic way to learn a new language, or just have some fun. It’s a time-bound programming challenge where you solve a new problem every day. The problems are fun, and we even have our own advent of code channel in the Boot.dev discord. Come join us!