The aracnum was soooooo close to defeating the Hound of Zaggoroth in this month’s boss fight. 88,297,514 xp was gained over the course of the event, and 90,000,000 was all that was needed to secure victory. It’s a shame, but we can’t win them all. The hound will return soon.
Ashamedly, Lane
Patch notes 🔗
1. New Course: Build an Asteroids Game 🔗
We have a new course (well, guided project) that slots in directly after the Object-Oriented Programming Course, and let’s you put those new found skills to the test. The asteroids course builds a simplified clone of the classic asteroids game using the popular Pygame library. Check it out if you’re a fun person who likes fun things.
2. Text to Speech 🔗
You can now listen to all of the lessons on Boot.dev! Very useful if you get tired of reading, or if you just like to read along to a beautiful English accent. The speaker icon at the top right of the lesson explanation will expand into an audio player, and you can change the playback speed as needed. (It’s just a standard HTML audio player, I’m not gonna brag about it).
3. New Fonts / Design 🔗
We’ve settled on two new fonts! “Arcuata” for headings, and “DM Sans” for body text. We think these fonts will help with the legibility of headings (Arcuata) while still maintaining the fantasy look and feel that we love so very much.
We’ve also made big updates to the design of several of our pages, namely the homepage for now. We’re currently in the process of a major redesign of the site, so expect more UI changes in the coming months. In particular, the in-lesson UI will look a lot cleaner soon and be easier to navigate. Our aim is to simplify the design, but also to allow you to get to what you want more quickly.
4. Go Replaced JS in the Track 🔗
We’ve been wanting to do this for awhile… and now it is finished. The JS requirements from the backend track are gone. Fear not! You can still take the JS courses, but now the HTTP Clients Course and the Web Crawler project default to Go. You can choose JS in the dropdown on the course landing page if that’s what you prefer (though idk why you would).
All that said, we are working on making all of the second half of the track (the backend specific stuff) available in TypeScript as well as Go. So there’s that to look forward to.
5. Testing Anthropic Claude Sonnet 🔗
Boots, our adorable and yet mythically powerful AI tutor, has historically only been powered by GPT 4o. We’re now testing new models to see if the results are better. Specifically, Anthropic’s new Claude Sonnet 3.5. Whenever you leave feedback on a Boot’s message (the thumbs up or thumbs down) it helps us know which models and prompts we’re using are most useful! So thanks for all that help!
6. Miscellaneous improvements 🔗
- A new
bootdev upgradecommand to auto upgrade the CLI - Go 1.23 now used in courses
- New Boots emojis and profile picture
- Added interactive checkboxes to many of the “todo” items in the lesson explanations
- Added markdown formatting to multiple choice lessons
What is yet to come 🔗
- Spellbooks (Grimoires? Tomes? idk). We’re aiming to solve several hugely requested features in one fell swoop. Bookmarks, note taking, and cheat sheets all wrapped up into one UI feature. Stay tuned.
- New Course: “Learn Memory Management in C”
- New Course: “Linux System Administration” (this is a working title, we’re still cooking…)
- New Track Option: The second half of the backend development track in TypeScript
Backend Banter Podcast 🔗
The last episodes of season 1 are out! Season 2 is planned for sometime in 2025. Here are the latest episodes:
- #069 - Season Finale: The Boot.dev Origin Story w/ Allan Lires
- #068 - Should you trust tech influencers? feat. Charles III
- #067 - How to Be Better than 96.487% of Devs w/ Aaron Francis
- #066 - CSS Is The Hardest Programming Language w/ Adam Argyle
- #065 - I Quit Voice Coaching for Typescript feat. Matt Pocock
- #064 - You’re doing networking wrong feat. Lawrence Lockhart
If you haven’t yet, subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts! If you leave a rating and a review, I’ll love you forever.
