The Boot.dev Beat. January 2024

Hope you had a wonderful holiday! I know you might not have been able to take time off, but I hope you were able to spend some time with family and friends. I spent the whole week driving up and down the state of Utah. It was fun, but I’m happy to be back in my office. Kids can be exhausting. Love ’em, but they’re exhausting.

Regards, Lane

Patch notes

1. Boots on all lesson types

Historically, Boots has only been able to provide AI assistance on code completion and multiple choice lessons. We’ve enabled Boots on all lesson types, even lessons where you’re completing a task on your local machine. Boots is aware of what you’re trying to accomplish and will provide hints and suggestions to help you along the way.

2. SQL course challenges

We’ve added optional challenges to the SQL course! If you’ve already taken the course and want to try the challenges, you are more than welcome to! We’ll continue to add challenges to all the courses that don’t have them yet.

3. Many bug fixes and UI tweaks

We spent a lot of our time this month just making small tweaks to various edge cases that we found cropping up. Quality of life stuff like updating the UI for updating your email address, improving Python interpreter error messages, and alerting you when browser extensions are interfering with the site.

What is yet to come

• More videos for the “Learn to Get a Coding Job” course
• A global survey for everyone learning to code
• Challenges and reworking of the “Learn JavaScript” course
• Lore
• Boss battles (I’ll say no more at this time)

Backend Banter Podcast

This month’s episodes include:

• #034 - Brain Oriented Programming with Philip Winston
• #033 - WebI is not a package manager feat. AJ O’neal
• #032 - React Server Components… in Go? With JLarky
• #031 - Trying (Practically) Every Functional Language and Landing on OCaml with Sabine
• #030 - The Future of Backend JavaScript with a Node.js Maintainer: Matteo Collina

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

The cream of the crop

(Podcast) Consider this before migrating the Backend to HTTP/3

by Hussein Nasser

Hussein is the host of the Backend Engineering Podcast! He does a great job tackling deeply technical projects in each episode, usually by himself. HTTP 2 and 3 are fascinating, and there is a lot of confusion around them. Hussein does a great job explaining some of the things you should consider before migrating to HTTP 3.

(Article) Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators

by Mitchell Hashimoto

Mitchell is a co-founder of one of the companies I admire most: Hashicorp. They make some of the best developer tools out there, including Terraform. He also blogs on his site, and I found this piece about terminal emulators particularly interesting. I’ve been using the terminal for as long as I’ve been a developer, and I had no idea about some of the intricacies he talks about.

(Article) Choosing Go at American Express [2019]

In 2019 American Express decided to start using Go for some of their backend services. This article is a great read about why they chose Go and how they went about introducing it to their organization. I love reading about how large companies make decisions like this. It’s a bit older of an article, but I still found it interesting!