The Boot.dev Beat. July 2026

In June we made a lot of updates to what's inside existing Boot.dev content. You can now work through the Linux course in a real in-browser shell, take multi-question quizzes, format your code with one click, and use OpenRouter on our AI-dependent courses.

Interactively,
Lane

Patch notes

1. A Real Shell in Your Browser

The Linux course now runs its command-line lessons in a real shell directly in your browser. You can explore the filesystem, run commands, and build the muscle memory that only comes from actually using a terminal, without installing anything locally.

This has been in the works for a while, and it opens the door for even more hands-on command-line courses in the future.

2. Multi-Question Quizzes

Multiple-choice lessons can now contain an entire quiz instead of using the same lesson explanation in a series. Answer a question correctly and the next one opens up; finish the whole set to complete the lesson and earn rewards.

Boots can also generate these quizzes now in the Training Grounds, so practice sessions now include another potential challenge type.

3. One-Click Code Formatting

The in-browser editor can now format your code with a single click. It uses the same kinds of formatters you'd reach for in a real development workflow: gofmt for Go, Ruff for Python, ClangFormat for C, and language-aware formatting for JavaScript and TypeScript.

4. Better Lesson Audio

Lesson audio now has a custom player that looks and works consistently across browsers. It includes playback speed controls, volume controls, scrubbing, etc.

We also upgraded the text-to-speech voice itself. Boots has never sounded better.

5. Meet the Artists Behind Boot.dev

We added a new artists page to give some overdue credit to the people who make Boot.dev art look like Boot.dev: Smashy, Martin Olivares, and Nymur Khan. They've created everything from character art and Discord emotes to the fantasy landscapes and villains that fill out the world.

Here's Lord Malcolm, illustrated by Martin Olivares:

Some of Smashy's character art:

And one of Nymur Khan's Boot.dev landscapes:

The full page has more of their work, bios, and links to follow them elsewhere.

6. Course Updates: N Queens, AI Agent, and RAG

We added a brand-new N Queens chapter to Data Structures and Algorithms in Python 2. It walks through the classic interview problem from brute force to recursive backtracking, then adds constraint checks and pruning before breaking down the time and space complexity of each approach.

7. AI Agent and RAG Provider Update

We also gave the AI Agent and RAG courses a major update. Both now use OpenRouter through the official OpenAI Python SDK instead of Gemini. The setup is much simpler, the SDK is more widely used, and OpenRouter's free tier gives you access to a rotating pool of models with more room to actually work through the courses.

8. Miscellaneous Improvements

• Reset lessons are more clearly marked, so it's easier to tell which lessons you've chosen to revisit
• Quiz explanations now appear closer to the question you just answered
• The completion orb on the dashboard now celebrates completed courses, not just completed chapters
• The Training Grounds does a better job detecting when you submit code from the wrong challenge
• Forum karma is harder to farm with low-effort spam
• We redesigned the course navigation to make more room for long course, chapter, and lesson names on desktop. On mobile, you can now select both chapters and individual lessons without leaving the lesson view, and the audio controls are finally available there too.

What Is Yet to Come

• Data manipulation course in Pandas and Polars (next week!)
• Web security in TypeScript course
• Bash scripting course
• Terraform course
• Redis course
• Excel course