The Boot.dev Beat. April 2024

Pythogoras returned in our second community-wide boss battle. He was vanquished, and there was much rejoicing. Happy coding.

Respectfully, Lane

Patch notes

1. New Project: Static Site Generator

This new guided project comes directly after the functional programming course. You’ll build a simple static site generator in Python: it works similarly to Jekyll or Hugo. This is a tough project, but it’s a great way to learn about file I/O, templating, and to put your new object-oriented and functional programming skills to the test.

2. Updates to Bosses + New Lore

The purpose of all our game mechanics is to encourage great learning habits. As such, we needed to make some updates…

• Boss battle achievements are no longer competitive, instead, they’re based on the total number of bosses you’ve helped to defeat. We plan to do boss battles on a semi-random schedule every 4-8 weeks.
• Bosses are defeated as the community gains XP. We removed the “damage” mechanic, it felt redundant.
• You now get a static XP bonus as the event goes along, and it’s based on how many fellow learners are participating.
• We’ve added a live feed of the boss’s health and the community’s progress in the event.

3. Profile heatmaps

Your public profile page now includes a GitHub-style heatmap of all your accomplishments on Boot.dev. You can also sync a GitHub account and it will show GitHub commits as well.

4. Miscellaneous improvements

• Added 20+ optional challenges to the Learn Go course.
• Big update to the OOP course
• Big update to the algorithms course
• More sidebar menus open as models so you don’t lose your place in the course
• Profile page leads much faster
• The leaderboard has a live feed of lessons being completed, as well as a full redesign

What is yet to come

• New Course: “Learn Pub/Sub Architecture”
• Chests (loot boxes) as the new primary reward system (don’t worry, no microtransactions)
• Baked Salmon, Seer Stones, and Potions to round out our shop of consumables
• New Course: “Learn Memory Management in C”
• New Course: “Learn Git”

Backend Banter Podcast

There is a brand new site, and because we moved hosting to Spotify, you can now also see the video version of the podcast on Spotify.

This month’s episodes include:

• #043 - Nuxt.js is better than Next.js ft. Daniel Roe
• #044 - Managers should know how to code ft. Thorsten Ball
• #045 - Whiskey, Web, and Wagners
• #046 - How I Spent $100,000/mo on CI/CD
• #047 - From Nursing to Programming ft. Trash Puppy

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.