Mortrunk has fallen. The community rallied in our Halloween boss fight spectacular. Well done. The Boots’ aura XP boost even hit 2x for a while there.
Gratefully, Lane
Patch notes 🔗
1. Spellbooks Released 🔗
Spellbooks have been a long time coming. Spellbooks solve some of the most requested student problems on the platform, namely:
- Bookmarking
- Searching past lessons
- Taking notes
- Cheat sheets
- Wanting additional examples
- Wanting more unlockables
Here’s how it works: There is now an additional toggle on the bottom left of the lesson view, next to Boots. You can swap between your Boots chat and your Spellbook there. Your Spellbook is made up of pages which are automatically unlocked as you complete their associated lessons. At any time you can search your Spellbook using the search bar, and open any relevant pages. This does not cost any gems to do. So, for example, if you’re learning about loops, and you forgot the syntax for a list, you might pop over to your spellbook (shortcut ctrl+shift+p) and open the “Python Lists” entry.
Each page contains:
- A brief summary of the concept
- Links to docs
- Several code examples
2. New UI 🔗
We’ve been working with an incredible designer (shoutout Charlie) to improve the UI/UX of the app. We’re moving toward a more fantasy-esque feel, while trying to keep the app clean and easy to use, and not so gamified that it’s distracting or perceived as unprofessional. We have more updates coming, but the big color changes are now in place.
3. Weekly streaks are now daily 🔗
Okay look, I know this one was a bit controversial. I get it. We hear you. This is a change that we knew we needed to make for a long time, its just so much more powerful to build a daily habit than a weekly one. If you only have one coding session per week its going to take you so long to reach your goals. So now streaks must be maintained daily, and frozen flames only protect you for 4 days.
Now, that said, we are working on some additional features to make this move to daily streaks feel less punishing.
- We are working on making your GitHub commits count toward your streak. This will be huge for when you’re stuck on a larger project, and you may have made a commit or two, but not enough to complete a full lesson.
- We’re cooking up a new “embers” feature. The idea is that on days where you go extra hard, you can build up a store of a couple embers. Then the embers keep your streak alive for a day when you miss.
Embers are there to make it so you can take weekends off, or miss a day for work or family without punishment - assuming you’ve been putting in the work on other days. Frozen flames are for true “vacation” days.
4. Miscellaneous improvements 🔗
- In app announcements of changes/events via toast notifications
- New custom Boots emotes in the Discord community
- Big update the data structures course, it’s now much more engaging and thorough
What is yet to come 🔗
- A full video walkthrough of ThePrimeagen’s Git courses
- Streak embers and GitHub commits
- Spellbook improvements, we always have a bunch of follow-on improvements after a big release based on your reactions
- More UI updates, particularly surrounding the game mechanics
- New Track Option: The second half of the backend development track in TypeScript
New YouTube Explainer Videos 🔗
We publish all of our explainer videos and course walkthroughs on our YouTube channel for free! Subscribe so you don’t miss any:
