The Boot.dev Beat. March 2024

Pythogoras escaped this month. The community rallied against the Serpent God, and while he was wounded and beaten back, he escaped. We’ll be trying again later this month. Happy coding.

Dutifully, Lane

Patch notes

1. Boss Battle

This month we ran our very first boss battle event! It was a ton of fun, we even had some students spend an… unhealthy… amount of time doing coding lessons as a result. Anyhow, we’ll be doing another one of these toward the end of March, but we’re making some big tweaks to encourage less competition and more collaboration.

2. Frozen Flame

Weekly streaks are, arguably, the most important game feature on Boot.dev. They’re designed to keep you consistent with your coding habits. One painful thing about them is that they fully reset if you miss a week. We’re introducing the frozen flame item, which you can purchase with gems and will be auto-consumed if you miss a week to keep your streak alive.

We’ve also started commissioning custom art from artists rather than relying so much on AI-generated art. It takes longer of course, but we think the quality is so worth it.

3. Chapter 1 Lore

We published chapter 1 of “The March of Time” alongside the boss fight! If you’re enjoying the story, be sure to let us know. We’re thinking of cutting it into a free audiobook for the community… let us know if you think that’s a good idea.

4. Other tweaks

• Notification preferences in settings
• Warning of XP loss for solution viewing
• A11y improvements
• Go and Advanced Algorithms courses migrated to “unit test” lesson format
• “Run” (apart from “Submit”) added to HTTP test lesson types
• “Add certificate to LinkedIn” button
• Autocomplete in the editor for Go lessons

What is yet to come

• New Guided Project: Build a Static Site Generator
• Big update on how Boss Battles work
• Challenges and reworking of the “Learn JavaScript” course
• More lore
• Course on memory management in C
• Course on Git

Backend Banter Podcast

This month’s episodes include:

• #042 - Rust is the WORST language to learn first ft. Teej DeVries
• #041 - From Roblox to software founder ft. Lewis Menelaws
• #040 - The man who wrote the book on DynamoDB ft. Alex DeBrie
• #039 - Get promoted by being lazy ft. Dax Raad

If you haven’t yet, subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts! If you leave a rating and a review, I’ll love you forever.

The cream of the crop

(Video) Why is the heap so slow?

by Core Dumped

Stack and heap are super important ideas to understand in programming if you care at all about performance. This video does a great job covering the basics and visualizing how they work. The AI voice is a bit off-putting, but the content is fantastic.

(Article) How I turned my open-source project into a business

by Andris Reinman

I’m a big fan of open-source, and open-source business models are pretty hot right now. This was an interesting read about Andris’ experience earning money from an open source project, and some of the non-intuitive things he learned along the way.