Today, we bring you the final episode of the first season of Backend Banter! It’s a wrap up for now. With 69 episodes behind us, we want to tell you the story of Boot Dev and how far we’ve come from our beginnings, and for that, we bring Allan Lires, the first official employee and the second person to work on our platform!

We’re going to cover our entire timeline, achievements, hardships, how Lane and Allan were able to go all-in on building Boot Dev and our visions and plans for the future.

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Allan's X/Twitter: https://x.com/AllanLires

Boot.Dev Discord: https://discord.com/invite/EEkFwbv

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

00:01 Last episode of Season 1 of Backend Banter

01:45 Boot.dev Story and what this episode will be about

02:26 How and when Allan was hired to work at Boot.dev

05:33 Timeline on Boot.dev

08:53 Guessing game

10:34 The Rebranding Process

12:43 Going Full-time

14:56 What was the curriculum in the beginning?

18:38 What was the original vision for Boot.dev

19:17 Being honest about how long it'll take you to learn to code

22:48 Setting expectations for difficulty

29:55 On learning the fundamentals

34:42 The Long Term vision of Boot.dev

41:30 Old gamification features and why we changed them

50:26 The Track is Never Complete

55:01 We cover a lot of the basics that traditional colleges don't cover

01:00:06 Why do we want to remove JavaScript from the learning course

01:06:12 Million Lessons Completed in a single month

01:08:28 You got to be comfortable being uncomfortable

01:13:25 Where to find Allan

Today we welcome Chuck Carpenter aka Charles The 3rd, co-host at Whiskey Web and Whatnot.

As two content creators in the tech scene, we discuss if and how celebrity developers and tech influencers are a good thing for the community, how we should be careful when choosing technologies based on influencers’ opinions, why so many people nowadays want to speedrun their whole career and how that could be self-sabotage, and a lot more!

Learn back-end development - https://boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Whiskey Web and Whatnot: https://whiskey.fm/

Charles' X/Twitter: https://x.com/charleswthe3rd

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:27 Does Charles listen to his own podcast episodes?

03:33 Are celebrity developers a good thing?

09:11 Podcasts are usually centered around a business

10:06 We are essentially entertainers

14:04 Tech choices being influenced by creators

17:37 Why ThePrimeagen stood out from other tech influencers

20:26 Career speedrunning

23:44 The biggest miss when starting something

24:51 What is wrong with Full-Stack application frameworks?

29:03 How Frankenstein is the Boot.dev web application stack

37:41 Rolling your own stuff vs using a provider

46:01 It's easy to screw up your architecture

50:53 What is Charles building with in 2024 and what is his preferred stack

56:39 Does it seem like people don't talk about security anymore?

01:00:30 Accessibility

01:02:02 The amount of people that are "kinda" interested in cybersecurity

01:11:03 Have some patience

01:11:37 Where to find Charles

In today’s episode, we bring back Aaron Francis. If you haven’t watched our previous episode with him, he is a software developer, fellow content creator and co-founder of Try Hard Studios. In the past he’s been an accountant at a Big 4 but now he focuses on Laravel, web development and all things business and video.

This episode will step away from the usual tech focused content and we’ll talk a bit more about the business side of things, how you have to balance entertainment and education when creating courses, Aaron’s High Performance SQLite course, building a personal brand through the discomfort of centering it around yourself, how good presentation matters and how proactiveness puts you miles ahead of the majority, so stay tuned!

Learn back-end development - https://www.boot.dev

Listen on your favorite podcast player: https://www.backendbanter.fm

Aaron's X/Twitter: https://x.com/aarondfrancis

Aaron's Website: https://aaronfrancis.com/

High Performance SQLite: https://highperformancesqlite.com/

Screencasting: https://screencasting.com/

Mostly Technical Podcast: https://mostlytechnical.com/

Timestamps:

00:00 Intro

01:32 Podcast listening going up when having a kid

02:25 Podcast about earning the first million

08:54 You have to choose the entertainment vs education levels

10:37 You have to shape your material to the platforms

16:40 Long hour videos vs 2 minute ones

20:16 Are the videos in the High Performance SQLite in linear order?

24:19 Figuring out the metrics

28:06 Building courses on other domains

31:46 Building brands is difficult

35:55 quick disclaimer

36:30 Personal brand vs company

37:57 Is this sellable?

40:23 Do you need an audience?

44:26 The strategy is simple but it is also hard to execute

49:31 The presentation matters a LOT

51:54 On being proactive

57:00 Where to find Aaron