On February 9th, 2026, GitHub went down. Not “a little slow.” Not “some features degraded.” GitHub.com, the API, Git over HTTPS, Actions, Copilot - basically all of it was throwing errors.
In May of 2013, Yahoo announced plans to buy Tumblr for 1.1 billion dollars. Yahoo’s CEO, Marissa Mayer, stood in front of the press and said, “We promise not to screw it up”.
April was a polish-heavy month for us here at Boot.dev. We shipped many small improvements to the lesson experience, added Custom Learning Paths, made the Training Grounds easier to navigate, and cleaned up mobile UX annoyances.
It feels like every week Dario (Anthropic’s CEO) is yelling about how AI is going to destroy white-collar jobs, particularly software engineering jobs. Well, in April 2026, about 4 years into the “in 6 weeks, AI is taking your coding job” cycle, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is finally talking about the potential consequences of that narrative:
March was a monster month. We shipped the new DevOps learning path (18 DevOps courses!), 2 brand new courses, upgraded the in-browser Python coding experience, and made Boot.dev noticeably better on phones.
If git merge feels noisy, that’s because it can be. Lots of noisy merge commits make history harder to scan, especially when you’re just trying to understand what actually changed. git rebase takes a different approach: instead of creating a merge commit, it replays your branch commits on top of the latest base commit so your history stays clean and linear.
Git is distributed, which means your repo and my repo can both be valid “sources of truth”. In practice, teams usually pick one remote as the shared source (often GitHub) and sync local work against it… but that’s just a convention. Let’s dig into how syncing Git repositories to GitHub works, and how that’s just one way to work with Git.
If you’ve ever made a commit and immediately thought “noooope”, then git reset is what you need. It’s one of the most useful Git commands for undoing work, but it’s also one of the easiest to misuse. The --soft version is usually safe and predictable. The --hard version is powerful and can absolutely nuke your local changes.
Git is the open-source command-line version control tool, and GitHub is basically just a collaboration on top of it. You can absolutely use Git without GitHub, but for most teams, GitHub (or something similar) is where a lot of the collaboration happens. Linus Torvalds created Git, and… well we don’t talk about who owns GitHub these days…
Many devs adopt the git add . (yolo, just yeet it all into the commit) workflow. It is fast, simple, and usually correct. But eventually you’ll have files in your repo directory that should never be committed: secrets, generated artifacts, dependency folders, and random local junk. That’s what .gitignore is for.
A Git branch allows you to keep track of different changes separately. For example, you can create a new branch to experiment with changing a color scheme without affecting your primary branch. If you like the changes, you merge (or rebase) the branch back into main. If you don’t, you delete it.
Git stores author information so that when you’re making a commit it can track who made the change. Here’s how all that configuration actually works.
Git is the distributed version control system (VCS). Nearly every developer in the world uses it to manage their code. It has quite a monopoly on VCS. Developers use Git to:
Let’s take a look at some of git’s “plumbing”, that is, the commands that are mostly used for working “under-the-hood” with Git, and that you’ll only use if you’re trying to debug your Git files themselves.
“What’s the point of having multiple branches?” you might ask. They’re most often used to safely make changes without affecting your (or your team’s) primary branch. Once you’re happy with your changes, you’ll want to merge them back into main so that they make their way into the final product.
If you ask ten developers for a definition of clean code, you will get twelve answers and one argument in the comments. Still, most of us agree on the practical goal: write code that other humans can understand quickly and change safely. That matters way more than writing clever one-liners that only make sense to your past self at 2 AM.
If classes and objects still feel slippery, you’re not crazy. Most tutorials either go too abstract or drown you in weird examples. The practical way to learn OOP is simple: understand how data and behavior stick together, then build small objects that are easy to reason about.
If classes and objects are the “what” of OOP, encapsulation and abstraction are the “how.” They’re how you keep code understandable after the project gets big, your team grows, and six months pass. They sound similar because they’re close cousins, but they solve slightly different pains.
Inheritance is one of those OOP tools that feels magical on day one and dangerous on day thirty. Used well, it removes duplication and keeps models clean. Used badly, it creates class trees no one wants to touch.
Polymorphism is where OOP starts to feel truly powerful. You stop writing giant if type == ... trees and start trusting shared interfaces. Different objects respond to the same method call in different ways, and your calling code stays clean.
We created our old blue/black/gray logo years ago before we redsigned the site to its new gold/brown/blue textured look and feel. As such, the old logo just doesn’t fit at all with the current state of the brand (as much as we loved it). So, we decided to work with an incredible designer (thanks Dusan!) to create a new logo that really captures what Boot.dev has become over the years.
AI isn’t replacing software developers - it’s changing how they work. And the demand for people who can actually build and ship software isn’t slowing down. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment for software developers is projected to grow 15 percent from 2024 to 2034 - much faster than the roughly 3 percent average growth projected for all occupations.
Learning to code can feel like a daunting task, so dense you do not even know where to start. But every great hero has to start their quest somewhere. So it is with coding, and the skills gained on the coding journey can make a huge difference in your real-world goals.
So you’ve decided you want to learn backend development so you can get a job - congratulations! Many self-taught coders have a hard time deciding between all the various programming job options, but it’s much easier to learn effectively if you have a clear backend developer roadmap to follow.
February was stacked with quality-of-life work and platform upgrades. A lot of this work is infrastructure-heavy and not quite as flashy, but it makes Boot.dev faster, sturdier, and more fun to use. Also: the DevOps learning path is very close. The AWS and logging courses are getting their final polish and should be landing any week now.