The Boot.dev Beat. January 2025

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:

Patch notes

1. New AWS File Storage 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

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

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:

• Why Your Backend Shouldn’t Serve Files
• Half The Problems In CS Come From This
• Depth First Search In 3 Minutes!
• The OG Of Serverless