Boot.dev Blog
Backend Developers are UX Designers Too
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Too often I neglect the idea of UX design in backend work. The goal of user experience design is to give users a product that's easy to use. In the world of front-end development, that typically means making it obvious how to navigate your site, using commonly-understood icons, or implementing well-contrasted colors for foreground and background, making your site easy to read.
For Loops in Go
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
For loops are a programmer's best friend! They allow us to execute blocks of code repeatedly and iterate over collections of items. In Go, there are several different ways to write one.
Advanced Algorithms Course Released on Boot.dev
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Sorry it took so long for me to get this one out! Data Structures and Algorithms 2 was just released, and I'm excited to let you all get your hands on it, even if you're just auditing it for free! The more advanced material takes quite a bit longer to produce, I wanted to triple-check to make sure I got everything correct and that I've presented it in a way that makes it easy to understand.
Are Coding Bootcamps Worth It in 2026? What the Data Says
by Maya Chen - Computer science and programming educator at Boot.dev
A review of audited bootcamp outcomes, tuition estimates, industry changes, and alternatives for prospective students in 2026.
Can You Get a Programming Job with Just an Associate's Degree?
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Changing majors is a tale as old as time. A degree that would normally require four years to complete can quickly turn into a more expensive endeavor that takes five or six years for a student that can't decide what they want to study. The interesting thing about programming jobs is that they don't require a degree at all, but if you at least complete an associate's degree, you'll have a better chance of landing that first job.
How I Organize My Local Development Environment
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
When I was just getting into coding, I was very disorganized. I would create a new text file in My Documents, work on it, never create a Git repository, accidentally delete it later, you get the idea. Nowadays I'm quite the opposite. To be honest, the thing that made me get my act together was the quite unpopular and now deprecated GOPATH that early versions of Go required developers to work in. I think it was the right move to not force that organization as a requirement, but I actually quite liked the method personally, and still use a version of it to this day.
All Coding Courses on boot.dev Are Now Free to Audit
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Last weekend I did a major revamp of boot.dev's payment strategy, after toying with the first version since I launched in the summer of 2020, as it turns out, the microtransaction (gem) strategy didn't work out to the benefit of my students, nor to the growth of boot.dev. As a result, I've flipped my funding strategy on its head and decided to make all of boot.dev's content free to audit. Let's take a look at exactly what that means.
Where Can You Get a Programming Certificate Online?
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
There are two ways to get a programming certificate online - universities and online courses. In the simplest possible terms, a programming certificate is something that lets you walk up to an employer and say, "Hello, yes, I know how to SQL. Here's a piece of paper that proves it. You should hire me."
Using a High-Level RabbitMQ Client in Golang
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
So you might already know that the amqp package is awesome and you can get up and running with just 40-50 lines of simple code. Unfortunately, the bare-bones amqp library doesn't handle a lot of the stuff you probably wish it did, things like reconnecting logic, the spawning of threads, queue and binding boilerplate, and flow control.
The Two Classes of Software Engineer
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
"Software engineer" has become a ubiquitous term for people who write, deploy, architect, or sometimes even simply test code. In reality, I think there are two classes of "software engineers"; those who understand computer science well enough to do challenging, innovative work, and those who just get by because they're familiar with a few high-level tools. The laziness with which the tech industry has adopted the term "software engineer" has made it harder for us to distinguish between the two.
Top 8 Benefits of Functional Programming
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Functional programming is a way to write code where programs are created strictly through functions. Functional programming has gained quite a bit of traction in recent years among the development community, mostly because of the benefits it provides.
Top 8 Tricks to Learn Coding Fast
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
The journey to becoming a gainfully employed software engineer can feel long. The good news is, you can learn smarter not harder. Apply these eight tricks and you'll be learning to program a lot faster than the average bear.
Is There a Case for Programmers to Unionize?
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
I've seen a lot of buzz recently about software developers wanting to form unions. I'm particularly interested in this topic while I'm #indiehacking boot.dev, where my goal is to provide a free-to-audit university-quality CS education. I also want to point out that at the time of writing I'm a full-time software developer working for a separate company (not boot.dev). I'm not a manager and boot.dev is just a side-project. As of right now, I'm pretty sure I'm a member of the proletariat.
View Git Tags with Semver Ordering
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
If you're like me, you wish all Git tags adhered to the Semantic Versioning standard. Unfortunately, Semver is just a convention, so Git tags can basically be any string of text. By default when you use the git tag command, your output will be in alphabetical order. Being a gopher, almost all the projects I work on are tagged according to Semver standards, which means the default output is fairly useless.
Why should you learn Golang? [2026]
by Meghan Reichenbach
Golang has skyrocketed in popularity year over year, making it one of the best choices for career-conscious developers to learn. As an example, StackOverflow's Developer survey saw it climb in popularity among developers from 10th in 2019 all the way to 5th in 2020. Additionally, a full 32% of developers surveyed in Insights Dice want to learn it. Go developers are paid well - globally, the StackOverflow survey found that Perl, Scala, and Go programmers have the highest salaries.
What Is Dry Code, and Is It Always A Good Thing?
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
"Don't repeat yourself", or "DRY" for short, is a somewhat controversial principle of software development. It aims to make code cleaner, which is to say less buggy and easier to work with. DRY purports to accomplish this by reducing repetition in your codebase and replacing that duplicate code with abstractions like functions, classes, and methods.
The Benefits of Gamified Learning
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
Why was that adjustment to college classes so hard? Sitting through hours of lectures and PowerPoints can be challenging for even the most dedicated students.
NLP is Hard Because Even Humans Don't Agree
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
In my full-time role at Nuvi, I've been lucky enough to work on a team where we're able to push the boundaries in the natural language processing field. We built out several different "facets" that we score text on, including sentiment, emotion, vulgarity, tense, and currently, we're working on promotion detection.
The 8 Crucial Mistakes Holding You Back From a Programming Job
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
If you're reading this article, you're well aware of the great benefits that come with a programming job - high salaries for programmers, an expanding job market, exciting opportunities.
Writing a Binary Search Tree in Python with Examples
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
A binary search tree, or BST for short, is a tree where each node is a value greater than all of its left child nodes and less than all of its right child nodes. Read on for an implementation of a binary search tree in Python from scratch! Also, if you're interested in really learning this stuff, you should check out three of my courses:
Building a Linked List in Python with Examples
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
A linked list is a linear data structure where elements are not stored next to each other in memory. Unlike and array, elements in a linked list use pointers or references to each other to keep the list intact.
The Best Ways To Get a Programming Job with No Experience
by Winston Wagner - Technical author at Boot.dev
It sounds like a pipe dream. A well-paid programming job, with no experience? Get out of town. Well, as it turns out, it's both just about as difficult as you believe, but probably easier than you think. As with most things, the main obstacle standing in the way of you getting a programming job with no experience is yourself.
The 8 Most Popular Coding Languages of 2026
by Zulie Rane - Data analysis and computer science techincal author
How can you decide what the most popular coding language is? It's like trying to pick the most popular ice cream flavor - everyone has a favorite. The truth is that different coders prefer different coding languages for different reasons, and just when you think you can say a single coding language reigns supreme, a new one crops up, or an older one becomes relevant for a new application.
Boot.dev's Refer a Friend Program
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
We think learning is better with friends! For every person you invite to join, you'll both earn some free gems. As soon as your friend signs up, we'll credit each of your accounts with, at the time of writing, 150 gems.
Converting an Array to a JSON Object in JavaScript
by Lane Wagner - Boot.dev co-founder and backend engineer
JSON, or "JavaScript Object Notation", is a highly popular data exchange format that's widely used in web development. In this post, we'll explore several simple methods for converting a JavaScript array into JSON data. Plus, we'll discuss the benefits of using JSON and how it can help improve your web development projects.
