Boots in snow

The Boot.dev Beat. January 2025

Boot.dev Blog » News » The Boot.dev Beat. January 2025
Lane Wagner
Lane Wagner

Last published January 2, 2025

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Fastest boss defeat in the history of Boot.dev, a new AWS course, embers are live, and my children just won’t stop being sick for more than 4 days at a time. Win some, lose some.

Exhaustedly, Lane

PS: If you’re curious how much boss fights help to get folks excited to restart their coding habits, check out this graph:

boss fight graph

Patch notes 🔗

1. New AWS File Storage Course 🔗

S3 course

Our brand new Learn File Servers and CDNs with S3 and CloudFront just went live! In it, you’ll build the backend of a video management site for YouTubers, learning how to use AWS S3 and CloudFront to store and serve files. The chapters include:

  1. File Storage
  2. Caching
  3. AWS S3
  4. Object Storage
  5. Video Streaming
  6. Security
  7. CDNs
  8. Resiliency

It’s a new addition to the core backend learning path, coming chronologically after the Learn HTTP Servers course.

2. Streak Embers are live 🔗

embers

This has been a much anticipated change to our streak system. Your Boot.dev streak is simply a measure of the number of days in a row that you’ve either completed a lesson or committed to a GitHub repository. Frozen flames are a relatively expensize item that is used to save your streak for 4 days when you are out on vacation or just can’t get to your computer. However, we’ve found that a healthy coding habit doesn’t really need to be 7/7 days of the week - and 5/7 days is perfectly reasonable. Embers solve this. You charge an ember when you go above and beyond for a day, and then when you miss a day in the future, the ember is consumed before any frozen flames, and before the streak is lost. They basically make the “daily” streak into more of a “5 days a week” streak, if you’re putting in a solid effort.

3. Chapter 5 Lore Released 🔗

chapter 5 lore

The community rallied this month to defeat “Kills the Joke, Vengeant”. And he wasn’t just defeated, but was truly brutalized - he went down in just over 2 days, our fastest boss kill yet. The lore for Chapter 5, where, (SPOILER AHEAD) Kills the Joke and Mortrunk’s assault on Ruebenberg comes to a head, is now live here.

4. More UI updates 🔗

A new progress bar and just in-course navigation menu is live. We’re really happy with the new style, but there are certainly some more tweaks coming based on the UX feedback we’ve received to make it a bit easier to use.

5. Miscellaneous improvements 🔗

  • Hundreds of small updates to lessons that weren’t making good enough use of the Bootdev CLI
  • New info modals for all the game features
  • Silently shipped more TS course versions (expect a big update for the TS track in the coming months)

What is yet to come 🔗

  • More UI updates, tweaks to mobile view, progress navigation, and a new dashboard
  • New Track Option: The second half of the backend development track in TypeScript
  • An updated JS course

New YouTube Videos 🔗

We publish all of our explainer videos and course walkthroughs on our YouTube channel for free! Subscribe so you don’t miss any:

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