The Boot.dev Beat. December 2024

Potions got a rework, solutions were added to the Git course, and I’ve been sick for like 10 days straight… hope your Holidays are staying healthier than mine!

Dutifully, Lane

Patch notes

1. 3-Month Gift Codes

This is a bit of a self-serving announcement, admittedly, but you can now purchase 3-month gift codes for Boot.dev. We wanted to give a sort of in-between option for anyone looking for a gift this year where 1-month might not be enough, but a full year can be a bit expensive. You can find the gift codes here.

2. Git Courses Walkthrough

ThePrimeagen has been gracious enough to do a full free walkthrough of not just one of his Git courses, but both of them. It’s up on YouTube now, and whether or not you’ve taken the interactive version, it can be a great refresher and way to get a bit of extra insight into how he thinks about Git himself.

3. Potion Updates

Potions now last for an entire hour (up from 30 minutes) and grant a 25% xp boost (down from 50%). Our goal with potions has always been for them to be a more fun version of a “study timer” or “pomodoro timer” for those of you familiar with that technique. We found that they were a bit short, and felt a little too high pressure, so we lengthened the time and reduced the boost to make them a bit more relaxed and fun.

4. Miscellaneous improvements

• GitHub commits now count toward your daily streak, as well as completing Boot.dev lessons
• Big updates to the beginning of the Python course, in particular there are now integrated info modals and lessons explaining the various game mechanics
• Added solutions to the Git course
• We spent a lot of time this month polishing up various UI rough edges, keyboard shortcuts and tooltips, making speed improvements, refactoring code, and fixing small bugs. Not really worth mentioning individually, but all together they’ll help us move faster going forward.
• We also have finished a lot of new content that just hasn’t gone live yet, there are several new courses in the works.

What is yet to come

• Streak embers
• More UI updates, particularly a new progress bar and course top navigation
• New Track Option: The second half of the backend development track in TypeScript
• A new course on file storage using AWS S3

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:

• Half The Problems In CS Come From This
• Is Quick Sort As Fast As They Say?
• BFS in 3 minutes
• Merge Sort in 149 seconds