I’m now an official Archmage :P

Last month one free month of Boot.dev was included in the Humble Bundle monthly subscription.

It’s not the first time that something like this has been included, but the first time I asked myself “how much can you actually get done in that month? Especially with a full time job, a family, activities etc”.
Boot.dev has been advertising quite a bit on Youtube so I knew they took a gamified approach to their courses.
You gain XP, you level up. If you reach lvl 100 you become an “Archmage” and even get a physical coin of some sort sent to you.

I decided to just give it a try and the format and lessons were actually pretty good. I saw a few more courses I felt were interesting and at the end of my first day I noticed had done several hundred lessons and reached lvl 50 (since xp requirements for each level ramps up I wasn’t actually as “close” as I might have thought after the first day).

“Could you speed run Boot.dev? Could you reach lvl 100 during the free month?”. I would have guessed that reaching lvl 100 must be something that takes forever, since less than 1000 people had reached that level out of the almost half a million registered users they had. But could it be done? Looking back, clearly their gamification got me hooked too 🙂

So along with 5 projects where you did everything from building a Maze Solver in Python to cloning Asteroids etc, I managed to get through

* Learn Linux
* Learn Git
* Learn Git 2
* Learn to Code in Python
* Learn Object Oriented Programming in Python
* Learn Functional Programming in Python
* Learn Algorithms in Python
* Learn Data Structures and Algorithms in Python
* Learn Memory Management in C
* Learn JavaScript for Developers
* Learn Go for Developers
* Learn Docker
* Learn SQL

So 1429 lessons later I reach the end of my free month and the answer to “can you speed run Boot.dev to Archmage at lvl 100 in a free month?” is yes.

So I except everyone to call me by my official title from now on 😛

But jokes aside… How was it?
For an experienced dev, there is ofc some repetition. Although I personally like going back to basics at times to get the perspective of other people and perhaps pick up something I missed years ago when learning about the subject.

But for instance Go was new to me and I got to experience “learning” from scratch with them and I enjoyed it.

For someone starting out I think Boot.dev can be excellent. The gamified nature of it makes it fun and you get a sense of progress. I even got my son to sit down with it for a while and test their trial, and he’s usually more into philosophy than software development 🙂

I’m in the middle of the course “Learn HTTP Clients” using Go and have an additional 12 courses left on the site.
And I’m actually contemplating paying to be able to stick around to finish them all.

So would I recommend Boot.dev? Yes, yes I would. They have a good structure to their courses and ramp up the difficulty of them in a suitable way.