Boot.dev Beat. January 2023

If you can’t tell from my absurd profile photo below, I’ve been having too much fun with AI art this month.

I hope you’re having a great start to the year, and you’re reaching all your coding goals! Boot.dev has grown like crazy this month, we’re quickly becoming the #1 place to learn modern back-end development! I’m just excited to be here.

All the best, Lane

What we’ve done this month

1. “Learn Cryptography” course released

Okay, technically we re-released it, but this new course is so much better than the old one. Allan and I have learned a lot about making awesome courses. If you’re interested in cryptography, DevSecOps, or cyber security, and have already taken our Learn Go course, you should hit this up for sure.

2. Tries and heaps chapters added

We added 2 new chapters to the Data Structures and Algorithms and Data Structures and Algorithms 2 courses: tries and heaps.

3. Better gem store experience

Last month we released an update to the game system that enables you to use gems to buy XP boosts, and to recover your sharpshooter progress if you lose it. While that was awesome, it wasn’t obvious how to do it, so we’ve improved that experience.

What we’re working on now

• My wife is scheduled to give birth to our son on Feb 8th, so February is gonna be a bit slow, but Allan will still be working like a dog.
• We want to do a major upgrade of the “Learn Functional Programming” course, but we’re still working out some details on the direction we want to take with it.
• “Deploy an API” will probably be our next course/project, though we’re also working on other ideas like “Learn Kubernetes” and “Learn Networking”
• So many of you have done the challenges in the Learn Python course! We’re working to integrate the challenges directly into the course so that you don’t need to tab out and back in to get to them. Once we’re more satisfied with that experience, we’ll be adding more challenges to other courses.

Top picks for this month

(Video) The Software Engineering Ladder Explained

by Namanh Kapur

This video shows the differences between various job titles at large tech companies. It’s super useful to be familiar with when you start applying to jobs.

(Video) Tips From a Top Tech Recruiter

by Tiff in Tech

This is a great podcast episode where Tiff sits down with a super experienced recruiter and gets some questions answered. If you’re thinking about working with recruiters, this will be a good listen.

(Podcast) DropBox Removed their SSDs, got 20% faster writes

by The Back-end Engineering Show

This is a fascinating deep dive into Dropbox’s SSD caching system and why removing it actually made their writes faster.

Top plugs for this month

• (YouTube) Figuring our why your code is slow (IO timings)
• (YouTube) How HTTPs Works in 7 Minutes
• (Article) Don’t Start with Frameworks