Boot.dev Beat. December 2022

I hope you’ve been able to enjoy some time with family! I took (almost) an entire week off from writing code, which I haven’t done in a long time. It’s good to be back though, and I can’t wait to see you around the Discord community.

All the best, Lane

What we’ve done this month

1. Gems are back!

You will earn gems by completing quests and unlocking new roles (like apprentice, scholar, mage, sage, etc). You can spend gems to buy temporary XP boosts to help rocket you to the top of the leaderboard, or to save your sharpshooter progress when you get an exercise wrong.

As always, the goal of the game is make it hard to tear yourself away from your studies. Good luck.

2. Vim Mode

We want to give the Boot.dev environment a native feel, so that you’re just as comfortable coding in the courses as you are on your local machine. If you’re an avid Vim user, you can now enter normal mode by simply pressing the esc key.

3. Auto-complete

This is a simple and subtle improvement, but one that’s been requested by many of you. When you start typing in Python or JavaScript (we’ll be adding Go next) you’ll see a little autocomplete menu pop up. This should make it much easier to use existing tokens and avoid typo-related errors.

4. Migrating to TypeScript

This doesn’t directly impact the Boot.dev platform, but we’ve started migrating the front-end of the app from JavaScript to TypeScript. So far the migration has already helped catch some subtle bugs, and we’re excited that by having all our code in TypeScript, we’ll be able to fix future bugs and release new features more quickly!

What we’re working on now

• Making the gem system more intuitive and easy to use. Right now you need to click on the gem icon or the sharpshooter icon to spend gems, but we want to make it more obvious how that works.
• The next course we release will probably be “Learn Kubernetes”, but we also spent a lot of this month recording a video walkthrough of “Learn HTTP” that we’ll be releasing soon.
• We want to do a major upgrade of the “Learn Functional Programming” and the “Learn Cryptography” courses.
• We plan to add a few more key data structures (Tries and Heaps) to the “Learn Data Structures” course.

Top Picks for December

(Video series) Git must know commands

By Eddie Jaoude

Eddie has a great YouTube channel! He talks a lot about DevOps and Open Source, and I really liked this series on Git commands. You don’t need to be a Git expert for your first job, but you do need to know this basic stuff.

(Video) People Get Microservices Wrong All The Time

By Continuous Delivery

I agree with Dave Farley from Continuous Delivery on quite a lot (but not everything… I have a slightly different view on paired programming, for example). That said, this was a great discussion about Microservices. I hope you enjoy it.

(Article) Always use closed, open intervals

By Fernando Hurtado Cardenas

I saw this one on Hacker News (I think?) and really liked it. Of all the inclusive/exclusive combinations you can use for defining ranges, [closed, open) makes the most sense.

(Article) Designing Go Libraries: The Talk: The Article

By Abhinav Gupta

This article does a great job explaining how to build high-quality libraries in Go. I’ve always believed that adding a library to your portfolio will help a lot in your professional development. It helps you stand out and appeal to hiring managers as someone who can write high-quality code that others will actually download and use.

Top Plugs for December

The Boot.dev YouTube Channel

We’ve started publishing more coding videos! Many of the videos end up embedded within the courses, but some aren’t about specific course material, so you’ll need to check them out on YouTube. It’s free to subscribe of course, so go watch some of our recent videos and subscribe to our channel!

(Article) College: A Solution in Search of a Problem

By Lane Wagner