The Boot.dev Beat. January 2026
We’re off to an incredible start to 2026. December of 2025 broke a new record with 3,075,904 lessons completed and 82,578 training grounds challenges completed during the month! In January, I’m writing this on the 13th, and we’re already at 1,657,581 lessons and 47,795 challenges - so it’s looking like this is going to be a monster month. Best of luck to you all in the contest of the resolute.
Sidenote: You may have noticed that it’s been a couple of months since our last course release - we actually have quite a few courses in the works, they’re just all going to be ready near the same time xD So expect a lot of new content dropping over the next few months. We’re scaling up our production capabilities and plan to release courses more frequently. As always, quality is our absolute top priority, so sometimes the courses take longer to finish than we expect. We’ll combat that by starting more projects in parallel with more authors, but we will never sacrifice quality for speed.
Resolutely, Lane
Patch notes
1. New Background Image
For the last couple of years we’ve finally had the money and time to commission human artists for the assets we need on Boot.dev - I never liked resorting to AI art, but in the early days it was that or stock art, and, well, stock was worse.
Fast forward to today, and every piece of art on the platform has now been drawn by a human (there are some old blog posts, but the platform itself is solid), and today was the big one - the main hero image on the landing page.

2. Challenge Search Improvements
In The Training Grounds you can search for existing challenges if you know the topic that you’re looking for. We recently overhauled our more simplistic search feature for a full semantic search system powered by Cloudflare’s search offering. There are more tweaks coming, but preliminarily this is a huge improvement to the simple keyword search that we had before.
3. Lesson and Spellbook Search Improvements
Next to Boots in the bottom-right corner of each lesson, you’ll notice the “spellbook” and “lessons” tabs. The spellbook tab is a collection of “spellbook” pages that you unlock as you progress through the lessons. Not all lessons have a spellbook page, but many do. The spellbook pages are essentially documentation, examples and cheatsheets for the concepts learned in the lessons.
There is also the “lessons” tab, which is simply a search through the lessons themselves. Use this when you can’t find what you’re looking for in the spellbook. Lessons open in a new tab instead of within the help corner, and they’re not as concise a summary, but they’ll do if you don’t have the spellbook page you’re looking for.
4. Bookbot Course Moved
The Bookbot guided project used to come after the Git course, but it has now been moved before the Git course and still after the Linux course. We like this change because it allows students to jump into their first simple coding project before learning Git, which is a bit heavy of a topic before you have ever had a single local codebase to work with.
5. Miscellaneous Improvements
- Boots interview custom instructions improved
- New site footer - improved navigation and links
- Support for NumPy and Pandas added (this will be used in an upcoming course…)
What Is Yet to Come
- A data visualization course in Power BI
- A new logging and telemetry course
- A cloud infrastructure (AWS) course
- A web security in TypeScript course
- A data manipulation course in Python, Pandas, and NumPy
- A Bash scripting language course
- More powerful LSP-like features in the in-browser editor
Related Articles
The Boot.dev Beat. December 2025
Dec 07, 2025 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
We plan to wrap up 2025 with some important quality of life updates! League placement badges, lesson bookmarks, and major improvements to the Training Grounds are just a few of the highlights. Thanks for learning with us, we’re gearing up the platform for a ton of new courses in 2026.
The Boot.dev Beat. November 2025
Oct 30, 2025 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Isaac’s new Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) course is now live! It’s a very in-depth course. It’s not for the faint of heart, and it will teach you not just about AI search, but full keyword and semantic search systems as well… the “RAG” name actually sells it a bit short.
The Boot.dev Beat. October 2025
Oct 01, 2025 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Searchable challenges in the Training Grounds, and realtime voice chats with Boots are now a thing. Also, my children and those of half my employees are sick with the flu… I hope you’ve all been able to avoid it!
The Boot.dev Beat. September 2025
Sep 08, 2025 by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
The training grounds are LIVE! 21,000 challenges have been generated between the launch and as I write this, and we’re just getting started. Big things to come.