Happy All Hallow’s Eve. I hope you enjoy this month’s cover art. It might be my favorite so far.
All the best, Lane
Patch notes 🔗
1. New Learn to Get a Job Course 🔗
I’ve been slowly building this course in the shadows for awhile, collecting all the best job search advice from coworkers, hiring managers, and even my podcast guests. This is an info course that will guide you through the process of creating a portfolio or projects, resume, GitHub profile, etc. I even talk about the best ways to source job opportunities, and how to prepare for interviews.
The course is in private beta at the moment! It will be fully released this week. If you’d like early access (realize there might be some rough edges) you can use the link above.
2. Big updates to Boots 🔗
Boots, our amazing in-app AI mentor has undergone some serious improvements. They include:
- GPT 4 instead of GPT 3.5
- He now uses the Socratic teaching method to help you solve problems instead of just giving you the answer
- Chat-first, meaning you now just strike up a conversation instead of highlighting code
- One-click button to include your code in the chat
3. New notification system 🔗
We added a bell icon to the top left of the screen where all your quest completions, course completions, and achievements will be shown. We’ll be iterating on that UI in the coming months. Our goal is to make the notifications less obtrusive (a modal used to popup in your face), but also make sure you don’t miss anything.
What is yet to come 🔗
- Working on a new style of explainer videos
- New “Learn Kubernetes” course
- Challenges and reworking of the “Learn JavaScript” course
- Updates to make sharpshooter less painful and more rewarding
- Plans for a new “unit test” assignment type
Backend Banter Podcast 🔗
We created a new trailer for the podcast. You know, so you can share it with your friends.
This month’s episodes include:
- #020 - Running SQLite on the Edge with Pekka Enberg
- #019 - Full-time vs Freelancing vs Starting a Company with Rob Walling
- #018 - Data Engineering for Gophers with Miriah Peterson
- #017 - Writing Go at Multi-Million Dollar Companies with Mat Ryer
Be sure to subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice! And leave a rating & review if you really want to help us out.
The cream of the crop 🔗
(Article) Raspberry Pi 5 is coming 🔗
by RaspberryPi
In some ways I owe my early career to Raspberry Pi. My first job was writing low level scripts on a Raspberry Pi that interacted with hardware sensors and pushed data to a web server. That was with a Pi 2 and Pi 3, and now the 5 is being released! If you’re interested in building software projects that interact with the real world, I highly recommend looking into the Raspberry Pi.
(Video) The TRUTH About Golang Backend Frameworks 🔗
by Melkey
I clicked on this video in my YouTube feed expecting to disagree with Melkey because I have strong opinions about web frameworks in Go, but we are on the same page for the most part! In a nutshell, you don’t need a heavy handed web framework with an ORM and all that, and there a bunch of lightweight routing libraries that do a great job in Go. Give this one a watch.
(Article) Learn to Code the Slow Way 🔗
by Lane Wagner
Yeah, yeah, it’s my article. But this is my newsletter so I can plug my own stuff if I want. I had a lot fo fun writing this one, because this topic has been on my mind a lot recently. In a nutshell, coding is hard and if you wanna succeed you need to be prepared to take the longer road, there aren’t any shortcuts.
