The Boot.dev Beat. February 2026
Last published February 11, 2026
A new year and another record broken! In January a combined 4,016,641 lessons and challenges were completed by you, dear pupils! And to top it off, we’re now releasing the much anticipated Power BI Course by none other than Alex the Analyst! I hope you enjoy it.
Pridefully, Lane
Patch notes
1. New Data Visualization in Power BI Course
Alex the Analyst’s new Data Visualization in Power BI Course just went live today, February 11th, 2026! If you want to truly master the art of business intelligence, in this immersive course you’ll learn to transform raw data into stunning interactive dashboards that drive real-world decision making at large companies.
Now if you’re wondering:
- Why Power BI?
- Why Windows?!?
Well, we did a TON of research on the most popular data visualization tools in the industry, and because this course will be part of our upcoming data analyst career path, we wanted to use the tool that’s most likely to actually get our students hired in the industry. The big 3 tools are Power BI, Tableau, and Looker, and Power BI seems to be the clear winner at the moment. See below for the Google Trends data.
Power BI is, of course, a Windows product, which means that we had no choice but to make the course Windows-only (which broke our Linux-pilled hearts). That said, data analysis as a whole is a pretty Windows-heavy field, it’s important to remember that a lot of the enterprise finance and marketing companies that hire data analysts are Windows shops, so being familiar with that ecosystem is valuable anyway.
Lastly, I just want to mention that Boot.dev is not “pivoting away” from backend development. Our Backend Developer Career Paths are still our flagship learning paths, and will continue to get new courses and updates. The data analyst path is just a new addition to our offerings, and frankly, was some low hanging fruit for us to add because so much of our existing high-quality Python and SQL content fits into it perfectly.
2. Contest of the Resolute Awards
January’s Contest of the Resolute was a major success, seeing lesson and challenge submissions increase by nearly 30% in a single month! Congratulations to all of you that kept your streak alive and earned the coveted “Resolute” badge, and an extra congratulations to the top 10 XP earners! They’ve been contacted and will be receiving custom Boots plush teddy bears in the mail (as soon as Chinese New Year stops delaying our shipping xD). The winners were:
- Reaper1219
- niudevelop
- Superman
- richp
- Phoenix
- GoobyNooby
- Geoff Riley
- Marcello
- wayrick
- ArchBober
3. Added native JQ support
If you go about taking our new Power BI course, you’ll notice it’s quite a bit different than other Power BI courses out there.
- It’s not just a bunch of videos
- It’s not a VM you connect to in your browser
Instead, true to Boot.dev form, you use Power BI on your local machine, and use our bootdev CLI tool in a PowerShell terminal to run tests against your very real Power BI project. (We like all our courses to be as real-life as possible). Anyhow, in order to make that happen, not only did we have to familiarize ourselves with the insanity of the .pbip file format, but we needed to add native JQ support to the bootdev CLI so that we can parse those crazy report files and accurately test for the changes you make in each lesson.
To be honest, it was quite fun, and we’ll likely be reusing that JQ functionality in quite a few other courses as well for more granular testing capabilities.
4. Miscellaneous Improvements
- Added for school and for business information pages
- Added a team report card page for business multi-user accounts
- Fixed issues with Hotmail email deliverability
- Recalibrated PPP discounts and currency conversions for non-US countries
- Improved moderator features in the community Discord
- Updates to Boot’s system prompt based on common student custom instructions
- Fixed memory bloat on Boot.dev’s frontend due to overly aggressive caching of lesson content
What Is Yet to Come
- In-browser Python type hinting and LSP
- 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 course
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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.
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