Behind the Scenes of Creating Boot.dev: Teaching Backend the Right Way

Ever wondered what it takes to create a course that truly makes an impact? In this episode, I sit down with Lane Wagner, the creator of Boot.dev, to dive deep into the philosophy and decisions behind one of the most comprehensive backend development platforms out there.

Lane shares his journey from a backend developer to an educator, revealing the challenges, insights, and strategies that helped Boot.dev stand out in a crowded market. Whether you're an aspiring course creator or an aspiring backend developer looking for inspiration, this behind-the-scenes look offers invaluable lessons on teaching backend development the right way.

Lane Wagner (guest):
Twitter - https://x.com/wagslane
Linkedin - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wagslane
Website - https://www.boot.dev
Boot.dev Metrics - https://blog.boot.dev/education/state-of-learning-to-code-2024

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Chapters

• 0:00 The Truth About Teaching Backend Development
• 2:51 Why Boot.dev Was Created
• 5:25 When Boot.dev Had 0 Students
• 10:40 Boot.dev’s Growth: Metrics and Key Insights
• 16:02 Boot.dev’s Insane Growth: What Changed?
• 24:36 AI in Education: Help or Hindrance?
• 30:22 A Flaw of Boot.dev
• 33:00 Stop Creating Mediocre Courses
• 38:04 The Vision to Create the World’s Best Backend Engineers
• 43:20 Advice for Aspiring Course Creators

Transcript

Don Hansen: 0:00

Today we are going to dive into the world of bootdev. If you don't know and if you haven't heard about them already, bootdev is a pretty lengthy in-depth course that aims to help aspiring backend devs try to land that first position and get them prepared. Do a better job at preparing people than a lot of the full stack courses, even coding boot camps, that'll kind of just touch on. When they do dive into backend, it's more no JS express, no opinionated framework, anything like that. They don't really dive into a lot of depth. They prepare you to kind of just be an app developer, where bootdev seems to dive a little bit deeper and really build that solid foundation. So you know full transparency.

Don Hansen: 0:45

I partnered as an affiliate with them. So you know there might be some bias. But I chose to partner with them for a reason and I get to bring on Lane again today to kind of dive into not only the history of bootdev, because I'm kind of curious about that, but also hopefully we can come out with some advice for any developers or content creators that are trying to create a course. And you know, selfishly I have some of my own questions that maybe Lane can answer. But Lane, you've been on before. I really appreciate you coming back on.

Lane Wagner: 1:16

Yeah, thanks so much for having me, man. It's great to be back.

Don Hansen: 1:19

Yeah, so just a quick intro because there might be some people that haven't come across bootdev or haven't come across you. What's a bit of your experience in the professional dev world.

Lane Wagner: 1:32

Yeah, lightning introduction. I was a professional developer for about four years, all backend stuff. I actually started my career writing writing go, which was kind of unique, especially back in 2016. Um, I I learned to go in college and then was able to find a job at sort of a local, a very small local dev shop um writing some python, writing some go, writing some c++. Um quickly moved from there to a larger sass, again writing Go, this time kind of more on the deeper back end side of the stack.

Lane Wagner: 2:11

It was like microservices, kubernetes, that kind of stuff for about another three years and then I transitioned into a management role. Granted, it was managing a small team of Go developers, so we were a team of like four, three or four, kind of you know, changed over the years, did that for three years and it was at that point this is just a couple of years ago where I quit and went full time on boot dev. So it's been about eight years now in total. But you know, half of that is an IC, an individual contributor, and then kind of half of that leading a as an IC and individual contributor and then kind of half of that leading a team of of go devs.

Don Hansen: 2:48

Okay, really cool. So quite a bit of experience. What inspired you to even build bootdev?

Lane Wagner: 2:56

Yeah, um, that's a great question because I mean, there's a lot of courses out there, uh, and it's, it's I would describe it as a fairly crowded market, uh, business like from a business perspective. But at the time so this was like 2020 when I, when I first started thinking about it um, my wife wanted to get into coding. Uh, she was working as an x-ray tech at the hospital where we lived and she's very she's. She's like me in the sense that she really likes math. She really likes to use that side of her brain, um, not as into like design and front ends right, and making things look pretty. But she really wanted to do kind of the logic, heavy math, heavy stuff, and um, so I was like great, like, let's find some online programs for you. She's really sharp again, really good at math. Like I knew she'd pick it up quickly. She already had a bachelor's degree in x-ray technology, so we didn't really want to go back to school to do another.

Lane Wagner: 3:54

You know, four years of CS education and at that time and this is a little bit anecdotal but like I'd worked with a lot of developers and about half the developers I'd worked with um didn't have a degree Right, so I was like very much in this mindset of like you don't need a degree if you, if you know what you're doing and you learn your stuff, um, so I was like let's go find, let's go find somewhere for you to learn.

Lane Wagner: 4:15

And I could only find front end uh related educational resources, at least online resources, uh, which is pretty frustrating. Um, and you'll also hear the term full stack, but at least, especially in my world, coming from like deep backend and uh, data engineering, like even the full stack stuff was like really front end. Right, it was like 80% front end and then like you connect it to my SQL or something, um, so I just kind of saw this gap, like in the education market. I was like you connect it to MySQL or something. So I just kind of saw this gap like in the education market. I was like it would be really cool if someone was out there teaching, you know, back end development, online, self paced, and then we have all the weird extra stuff that we do, like the gamification. That's just more, I think, the personality of those working on it more than anything else. Yeah, I think the personality of those of us working on it more than anything else.

Don Hansen: 5:06

Yeah, I think the gamification is really interesting and I think it's unique I haven't even seen that on the front end side and it shows, you know, maybe a bit of a preference for games in the past that you might have had. Like it seems like you really brought your history and your personality into bootdev and you know what. Let me ask you about that, like, why did you make the decision to make that? Because it feels like it's a very core piece of your course, but why do you make the business decision to make an educational resource so gamified?

Lane Wagner: 5:40

So I don't know how many people in your audience are business nerds or marketing nerds, but for those of you that are, if you one day want to start a startup, there's a book I'd recommend called the Purple Cow by Seth Godin Very good book. It is about exactly what it sounds like it's about. The idea is basically, if you're going to launch something, it should be a purple cow. It should be like a very unique, very strange. People should kind of look at it and like go huh, what the like, what the hell is that? It'll make it a lot easier to get traction and it also means you're probably adding something more again, unique and valuable to the world, because nobody needs another clone of an app, right, like, we need new, innovative, cool stuff.

Lane Wagner: 6:26

So when I started BootDev, the impetus was this focus on backend. It was a content differentiator, but then we fairly quickly decided this is like early days it was me and my first employee, alan that focusing really heavily on the gamification, making it fun, making the visuals interesting um, would just be another way to kind of stand out and make it and make it fun. Then we really started to do some research on like the psychological benefits of all the gamification was like wow, this actually makes it like way easier for people to stick with and there's some real educational benefits to doing it. But I will admit, originally it was just because it was fun.

Don Hansen: 7:11

That and I hear that all the time. With a lot of courses it's really especially like outside of coding boot camps, self talk courses. It's really hard to get people to stick with it. You might not have this, but offhand do you kind of have a ballpark average of like how many months people stick with bootdev before they drop out?

Lane Wagner: 7:32

yes, so I actually I'll plug this article. I just wrote it's if, if you go to blogbootdev it's uh, I moved my keyboard so I had to go find it. It's called the State of Learning to Code 2024 Report. So anyone that's listening that wants to bring it up. I just published this like last month. It's an info dump of all these kinds of stats Just in a blog post. It's like how many people are using Vim mode, you know what are the hardest courses, like all that kind of stuff.

Lane Wagner: 8:04

I gave a talk at Go West Conf and this was kind of the premise of the talk.

Lane Wagner: 8:06

But so to answer your question about when people drop off, the best data will be in that blog post. But that's actually a really hard question to answer accurately because people join for so many different reasons, and so there's a point in the blog post where I explained we want to do a better job of this, like what I mean by that is, for example, people will join just to take the Git course, which might take them two weeks, and they'll do the Git course and they'll love it, and then they'll cancel their subscription and like might come back later for another course, and then you have a lot of other people right who are signing up and starting at the beginning of the learning path. They tend to spend a full year going through it. So what I want to do is dig into that data of like almost separating people into cohorts by goal. So then we get a better look into you know what like how far they're actually getting in reference to what they want out of the platform when they join.

Don Hansen: 9:04

They're actually getting in reference to what they want out of the platform when they join. I'm going to move on after this question, but do you plan on doing that through, and first of all I'll link the article in the description? But do you plan on doing that through, like exit surveys to try?

Lane Wagner: 9:18

to curate that. I haven't thought of a better way to do it, unfortunately, here's the thing From, like, a product design perspective. I hate friction and so, like I always hate having those like when you join the platform. It's like asking you a bunch of questions and try. It's like I just want to let people fucking code. Sorry, am I allowed to swear on this?

Lane Wagner: 9:37

yeah, absolutely okay, I just want to let people code. Like I won't be able to join and start coding and so I don't want to have this whole. So that's actually one of the reasons we haven't really done that yet is we don't want to introduce friction into the getting started phase, um, but we have a few clever ideas, like, for example, there are certain courses where we know if you start with that course, it's very likely that you're just here for that course, like, for example, the git course. Like nobody joins boot dev to to start learning to code with the git course. It's like you start with the python course or you jump straight to the go course because you want to do advanced stuff, um, so it's like almost identifying entry points and then maybe we can uh, you know derive something from there okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Don Hansen: 10:21

Um, yeah, so maybe friction at a different point, but, um, you know and this is just something to keep in mind like it's really easy to chase people away. You're right about that friction and you hear a bunch of startup founders talking about that, especially with landing pages and stats on landing pages and conversions. So in the early days, what was like the most unexpected challenge that you faced? That really kind of put a wrench in things.

Lane Wagner: 10:50

So in the very, very early days, the wrench was just not having any students. Like it sounds dumb and obvious, but it's true. I mean, like for the, for the first year that I was writing courses, I think I wrote like three or four courses. I basically had zero students. Like I definitely had no revenue and was like spending more money and time on boot dev than I was getting out of it. Um, I mean, it was net negative all the way, like until a few months after I went full time, so I mean already over two years into the project at that point.

Lane Wagner: 11:23

Um, so, just underestimating how hard it is to find initial users when you have, you know, essentially no audience. I had a blog that had some traffic, but blogs are faceless, nameless things for the most part. Like think about the last 10 articles you read. Can you even name the authors, right? Um, it's so. It's a very low trust medium. And so converting you know blog readers who are there to you know, read about one particular article, one particular topic, into someone that's going to pay for a course it's very low converting, uh, conversion rate funnel Um, that was definitely the hardest thing, uh, uh, but maybe are you asking more about like product related, like what was hard to build.

Don Hansen: 12:11

I think I'm less interested in that. I think most developers can figure that out. I think you answered my question and okay, um, so I actually, you know, I I'm way back, uh machine. I looked up bootdev and so I think the first snapshot of an actual page was like September of 2023. So you were and I don't know if it's just inaccurate and it didn't grab good snapshots, but you were building courses before that. Did you name it anything differently or was it bootdev?

Lane Wagner: 12:41

Yes, it gets embarrassing. The Wayback Machine is a way to embarrass people that have been doing stuff online for a long time, but I mean we just got to own it. That's the cost of putting things out in public. Yes, so when I first launched it, I had a blog that was just called qvaultio, and the reason that it was named that is really dumb. I just owned that domain name and I had zero thought into you know what the domain name should be. I just already owned the domain name, so let's just launch it on there. The blog grew it.

Lane Wagner: 13:19

Actually, funny enough, the blog had more traffic before we rebranded the site from QVaultio to bootdev than it even does now, Just because the informational articles on there ranked really well for SEO. And that rebranding even though I set up all the redirects, the SEO just tanked. Google did not like the fact that we changed the domain name, but that's why you probably can't see the old versions of the site. It was light themed, it was. I mean, it's a disaster Like it's. You know, it's nothing like the boot dev we all know today.

Don Hansen: 13:54

The only characteristic you said was like theme and that's why it was a disaster. Exactly Um. So you you've achieved significant growth in my opinion. Um, do you mind sharing some metrics like number of students, and you know you don't have to go into details, that you really don't want to like revenue or anything private details, but can you paint a picture of like how large bootdev is?

Lane Wagner: 14:20

yeah, yeah, I don't mind sharing stuff. I think I I don't think it's information that, like you know, I don't think like clutching your pearls in in you know when you're building something and and and not sharing secrets with competitors. Like I think people way overestimate how much competitors are able to do with information that you give them not competitors.

Don Hansen: 14:40

But I'm thinking like your sponsorship deals, would they try to?

Lane Wagner: 14:44

oh yeah, yeah, I don't know. I mean like I wouldn't share how much. I'm, like you know, paying an individual sponsor, but I'm happy to share our revenue numbers. So, um, let me give you some numbers, uh. And, by the way, these are in that state of learning to code report as well, so if anyone's checking that out, yeah, so, uh, at the time of writing the report, we were at 336 000 registered users um and 18 255 of them were paying members um. Monthly revenue right now is, right, around 500 000 per month wow, okay, that's larger than I expected.

Lane Wagner: 15:23

That's gonna feel really good in the last 12 months um, I mean to give you some context and again, this is actually already public information, which is why I don't mind too much year we were at like 40K a month in revenue and then you just go back like another month or two and we were at like 20K in revenue. So the growth over the last like 15, 16 months has just been crazy.

Don Hansen: 15:59

Yeah, it sounds like it. What do you think were, like, the key decisions that you made to see that significant growth?

Lane Wagner: 16:08

um, so it's it's.

Lane Wagner: 16:14

It's really hard to pinpoint exactly what is responsible for the different things, but what I will say is, for like the six months leading up to when the growth really started, so, like, um, the beginning of 2023, like, say, the first four or five months of 2023, um, we just spent a lot of time on the product, like a lot, a lot of time building the platform, um, launching new courses, building tooling for the courses, making it more interactive, like, and we spent very little time on on marketing, um, and we saw very little little user growth.

Lane Wagner: 16:56

But then, when we did start to do more distribution stuff, particularly through video it's like I made some courses for free code camp, um, just like some free youtube courses, um, and a few other things that we did like we started to gain traction through like free video resources that we were putting out, I mean, similar to what you do on your channel, right, um? But because at that point, like we had a product that we knew was working because, again, it's not like we had no users before that we were, but we were working with a small user base but like we were iterating heavily on the content in the courses. So it's like when we did start to push traffic to it. It started to take off because, like the product was ready to grow at that point. It had been, it had been coalescing for like two years, right. So it was almost like we kind of just like let open the floodgates, so to speak, and have been riding that wave for the last year, like a year and a half.

Don Hansen: 17:55

That makes sense. So creating videos for kind of an already well-established channel like FreeCodeCamp was boot or backend banter, a strategy to bring in traffic to bootdev.

Lane Wagner: 18:11

So backend banter I mean it's, i's, I was really happy with. You know how much traffic it got, but like it's not going to drive you know the amount of traffic. You need to get the revenue numbers that we have been putting up or the registered user numbers right.

Lane Wagner: 18:27

Um, to me, the real purpose of back-end banter is to let people know, like, who the hell is building this thing right. Like when people like take a course, they want to know who's behind it. Like why should I trust this person? Do they even know what they're doing? Do I like how they communicate right? Do I like their teaching style? And so, to me, the podcast was a way to be like you know if you're unsure about it or if you just want to know who I am before you like pay for anything, because I mean a lot of people I shouldn't say a lot of people everyone starts out on like a free tier, free trial of boot dev and they're kind of in this decision making phase of like well, should I commit to a membership and get all the interactivity? The podcast is a way to kind of get to know the creator, and so it was actually less of a play of you know, bringing people in and more of a trust building for the people that are already sort of in the ecosystem.

Don Hansen: 19:21

That makes sense. So let me just, I guess, help clarify for me. So you saw significant growth, so you built trust with the users, which you know can indirectly provide some people to actually sign up and convert, uh, through back-end banter. But you saw the significant growth from creating free videos on already well-established channels, like free code camp. Would you say, like that's the the major marketing strategies.

Lane Wagner: 19:48

That helped that was the first big one. That was like what got us out of the we are not growing to. Now we're growing was a handful like three um courses that we made for Crico camp, and like I'll just say they were not, they were not low effort. Uh, like I spent a month on each of them, not like eight hours a day for a month, but like a few hours of every working day for a month. On all of those. They're like eight hour, nine hour courses, and so it was like a pretty big risk at the time. So it was like I mean we didn't have money. Really. We were like barely break even. I had one employee like, honestly, most of the revenue we were making was just going to his paycheck, uh, and so it was just like we got to try something and so we just put everything that we could into these courses and I mean we were pretty we were noobs at making videos back then. Um, luckily it worked out and I I mean Quincy Larson from free code camp is incredible, um, and he really appreciated the time and effort we put into it and he was nice enough to publish them, um, so, yeah, that worked out really well and I will say, I mean, we got lucky.

Lane Wagner: 21:06

Youtube. There's a lot of luck to YouTube, um, but like the video that we published last year, it um, it's a walkthrough of our how to get a job course. It's like three million views, so this is like an incredible amount of reach, um. But again, you know, it took me like that. One took me over a month to put together because I, I, I used clips from the podcast in there from like guests, in fact, I think, did I have? Did I ask you for a clip?

Don Hansen: 21:32

I am in there. You're in there. Yeah, I'm famous now of you.

Lane Wagner: 21:35

It's like that one was so much work to put together, but it did eventually pay off.

Don Hansen: 21:40

That was a really good video. You did a good job with that.

Lane Wagner: 21:42

Thanks, appreciate it.

Don Hansen: 21:45

That's an interesting strategy because you know a lot of content creators are really trying to figure out. I think a lot of content creators are focused on building content to be able to market their products and you know that's just a common strategy if you want to go full time as a content creator and you got to get that product out, but not a lot of content creators have achieved anywhere near the success that you have. And you know one thing that's interesting is always for me, pricing, because sometimes I see devs and content creators will do like a bulk or not a bulk pricing, but like $95 for this course and you essentially own it right Versus a subscription model. What made you go with $50 a month and that subscription model?

Lane Wagner: 22:24

Yeah, um, and I'll even just to clarify for everyone listening it's $50. We have a $50 a month a month tier, um, if you pay once every month, so pay monthly. And then it's like uh, 29 per month if you pay for a year up front, which is like discounted annual plans. Um, we used to have a lifetime. We can get into why I turned that off. Uh, here in a minute, um.

Lane Wagner: 22:48

But let me start with why I don't just do the thing that a lot of creators do, which is here's my course. It's ninety nine dollars. Buy it once you have it. To me, that's like static media. So it's like if I were selling a book or if I were selling a single cut of a video course, I would use that pricing model. It makes sense, right? It's like I made this video. I'm now selling this content to you. You can download it. It's $99. That's great.

Lane Wagner: 23:17

Boot dev is not that at all. Boot dev, the courses are updated almost daily. There's a team of nine of us and we get over 100 reports on the individual lessons in the course every day and we're in there updating them. You know, reworking assignments, trying to make them clear, trying to make the explanations better, the challenges better. So it's very much this like living product.

Lane Wagner: 23:42

And then and then, of course, the other thing is on boot dev, all of our content is already free, so the text, the videos, all that stuff's just, I mean, you can just create a free account and access all of it. What you're paying for when you buy a membership is the interactivity, which part of it is the ability to run the code in the browser and use the command line tool to check your work. Part of it also is the AI chatbot boots, which is not cheap to run because it's backed by, you know, open AI and anthropic, and so a subscription model is like the only thing that makes financial sense. It's like, you know, you get access essentially to chat GPT through the boot dev site, a specific, you know, version of chat GPT. That's kind of optimized for teaching the content, but it can't really make sense with any other monetization strategy.

Don Hansen: 24:35

Yeah, so the AI is named Boots, right? Yeah, he's a bear Nice.

Lane Wagner: 24:41

Okay.

Don Hansen: 24:42

So I feel like you know, I've been paying attention to AI being introduced into the educational space with developers and I feel like it's a pretty controversial push. I do see it being more controversial with building out essentially an entire course with AI and maybe there's not a lot of integrity, there's not a lot of quality control over what's being created.

Lane Wagner: 25:05

You're talking about, like generating a course with AI?

Don Hansen: 25:08

And that's where I'm seeing a lot of the controversy. But you have an interesting angle with it where you are using AI as a mentor. Now I'm kind of curious about the pros and cons of that and like what you've noticed in reports and complaints or anything like that, because I think my big concern is hallucinations, you know, incorrect data that's leading people in the wrong direction. I would imagine that's happening rarely, but can you kind of just dive into your experience with launching that the good and the bad?

Lane Wagner: 25:36

Yeah. So I mean, like everyone else, I've been following generative AI really closely ever since Chad GPT launched. The first thing I'll say is that generating content with AI educational content, like talking, like lessons, like the text or even scripts for videos or anything is dog water. Like, if anyone's doing that, like their content shouldn't even be ranking on Google, let alone like it's definitely not good enough to be paid for, and that's that's not like just a philosophical stance, like we've tested a lot, like you know what you can actually do with generating content. It's bland, it's not unique, it lacks real world use cases and experiences and stories. Um, it's really not good. And the whole play for us with boo dev is like if we launch a course, we want it to be like the best course there is on that subject. Now, of course, not everyone is going to agree. You know that our course is the best course there is on that subject. Now, of course, not everyone is going to agree. You know that our course is the best on this, but like that's our goal. So we'd much rather publish fewer good courses than more not as good courses. I guess is the way I, what I'm trying to trying to say. So we don't generate content with AI. I mean we. We use it for various things, like, for example, I found that it's really good at inserting links to documentation right, like when I cite one of the Go standard libraries things, it knows the link to that documentation. It's really easy to insert in our markdown. So it's made our lives easier. Like we're able to produce content a little more quickly using it. We're certainly not scared of it, but we can't generate content with it.

Lane Wagner: 27:13

Boots is very different. Boots is basically a chat GPT window built into the boot dev platform and there's two things that make it, in my opinion, way better than just like having chat GPT up in another window. The first is he's trained on the lesson, so he has context for what you're trying to accomplish and for our solution, so he doesn't really hallucinate bad solutions because he knows, like, the instructor's solution and then he's been trained to not give it to you. So this is like. The other value proposition of Boots is he's been trained with a bunch of examples on, like how to take where you're at and what you're struggling with and ask you questions about your approach. Like, oh hey, I see that you're doing this on this line, like that might be a problem for X, y, z reason. Can you look into that Right? So it's the Socratic method at the end of the day. But the goal is to have him guide you toward the solution rather than just hand it to you, like.

Don Hansen: 28:18

I mean, that's what chat gpt does by default yeah, you're right and I I think well, there's nuance in using ai's mentor and that's the nuance. You can't have. It give you the solutions you need to be able to critically think on your own, but you can have hints and steps towards. You know the right direction, but you don't really learn when you're given the solutions. It's the same when you're just copying and pasting from Stack Overflow. You know, even just like some people would justify copying and pasting and then reading out what's being written, but you still learn more thoroughly when you're writing it out yourself and thinking through the actual solution. So I like what you've done with that and I think it's an interesting concept. And so the context you know, sometimes you have that context window that is limited, which keeps expanding with open AI, but you're just kind of resetting that context window with some defaults, but the new problem, the new solution, and then you kind of don't need any other context from other previous lessons, right?

Lane Wagner: 29:17

For the most part, I'm trying to remember all that's in the context window. At the moment, like you said, the context window has gotten very large. Gpt-4.0 is like 128,000 tokens in the context window, oh wow.

Lane Wagner: 29:28

It's epic now. Yeah, it's gotten quite large, so like we're not really too constrained on space, um. But I think I think all we give boots for context is like the lesson you're on, the chapter you're on, and then basically, like you said everything in that lesson, like here's the solution, here's the current state of the student's code, here's what the student's asking. Um, use the socratic method and talk like you're a you know bear wizard I mean I went through it before I.

Don Hansen: 29:58

I partnered with you I I thought it was pretty neat. I liked him I'm glad.

Lane Wagner: 30:01

I mean and like you said, he does hallucinate sometimes like it's still an llm. Um, we just have a little disclaimer at the bottom. Of all his messages is like if, if you think there's a, if you think this is suspect, like go to the discord and ask a human like that's uh, our discord is is kind of the backup plan I like that.

Don Hansen: 30:19

I think that makes your program pretty unique. Um, what do you think is like a flaw about that, regardless of whether you think you can solve it or not, like what's that? Like one thing nagging in the back of your mind?

Lane Wagner: 30:32

That's a good question. At the moment the big thing is the lack of language choice. So at the moment if you want to do boot dev, you learn computer science basics in Python and then you learn backend development in Go. And, as you mentioned at the beginning of the show, our philosophy is about teaching fundamentals first. So you know our students that complete the whole platform by the end. A lot of them have gone on to get jobs writing java or ruby or whatever. Um, because they're confident enough to.

Lane Wagner: 31:09

You know, pick up a framework in another language within, you know it just takes like a couple personal projects and they're like good to go. But for, like I'll say first, that's not. That's obviously not as good as actually doing the like back-end portion in, say, ruby or java. If that's what you're going to go on and work in, like, that would obviously be better. And also that idea that, like, you can learn fundamentals in one or two languages and go on to be a developer in a different language.

Lane Wagner: 31:40

It's obvious to developers Like we know, that if we're really interested in a language like yeah, we can pick it up in a month unless it's rust, then it takes like seven lifetimes, but like any other language. You know, we can like pick it up fairly quickly if we understand the concepts. That's definitely not obvious to new programmers. There's this idea that, like when you're a programmer, you learn one language Like I'm a Python programmer and if I'm going to learn another language, it's like learning another natural language. It's like I speak French and English. I can't be a German speaker. It's like, well, actually, yeah, you can. I can't be a German speaker. It's like, well, actually, yeah, you can. It's like really easy to learn a third programming language once you know two.

Don Hansen: 32:20

So anyways, I would say the big weakness is we want to expand into other programming languages. That makes sense. And your focus still remains kind of on the foundation, which a lot of courses that probably are your competition seem to lack. A lot of courses are to supplement, um, they're there to, to supplement what computer science degrees don't give you, um, applicable skills with modern frameworks, that kind of let you hit the ground running with some positions at some companies, um. But when I was looking at studies I did see I guess I'm kind of answering the question I'm going to give you.

Don Hansen: 32:58

Maybe you have a different answer but when I looked at studies and I even back in the day when coding boot camps were actually they had some depth to it. They weren't just trying to spit out the last bit of profit as kind of the industry is going under, bit of profit as kind of the industry is going under. I feel like they did a really good job at getting people to hit the ground running and supplementing what CS students weren't capable of. But CS had a really solid foundation and it just wasn't programming foundation, it was CS concepts in general that make you marketable even outside of software engineer positions. But you know there are still kind of like. I think Bolt are really healthy, and if you have a long runway to be able to try to get your first developer job, you're eventually going to do Bolt, you're going to build a solid foundation and learn applicable skills, and it's going to set you up for more success if you can have that runway. What made you decide, though, to highly focus on the foundation?

Lane Wagner: 33:53

Yeah, my perception of coding bootcamps circa when I started boot dev so around 2020, um was like, as you mentioned, they were doing better than. But and this is this is very anecdotal, so I'm sure you actually know a lot more about this than I do my perception as a hiring manager, having interviewed, like some boot bootcamp grads and I'm sure it's skewed based on my geographic location and all that kind of stuff but was it? They did teach fairly shallowly Is that a word? Like they didn't go too far in depth. These are like 12 to 24 week programs and the students were more successful than they are now. Again, this is just anecdotes perception, but not because the boot camps were better. I think it was just because the market was easier. Like you know, the market in 2020 and 2021 for developers was undeniably much better than 2022, 2023, 2024. Right, I'm biased and I'm still of the opinion that development skills are incredibly valuable, um, and that you know the recessions, the tech recessions they come and go um, and you know it's it's hard to time the market. So you know, don't worry too much about that um. But yeah, my perception is one more of the market has changed and I think that it always was a better idea to get a solid foundation, because that was my frustration interviewing boot camp grads.

Lane Wagner: 35:29

I don't think it takes that much longer to learn the basics right. I mean we're talking about like all our marketing with boot dev says we say it takes about a year and I think that's true. Like some people it'll go a little faster, some people it'll take longer. But like you can learn fundamentals first, cs algorithms, data structures, programming, design patterns, how HTTP works, you can learn all of that in a year, as long as the curriculum is set out in a way that makes sense and moves smoothly so you're not constantly like restarting. Because my perception again has been that a lot of people getting into code they're constantly restarting. It's like the tutorial hell process, right. Restarting it's like the tutorial hell process, right. And so if you can map out this linear curriculum again very hard to do, but if you can do that then you can actually move fairly quickly.

Don Hansen: 36:31

I think starting with the foundations is incredibly important and it's doable and people shy away from it, but I do believe it's because courses are boring, which I think does make bootdev very unique. Um and it it is hard to do to supplement a cs degree which is spitting out software engineers that are going to be competitive in a different way than you as well. And how do you supplement that? Do you need to take every single course, including general studies, that you're going to go through with an entire CS degree? No, but you do have to understand and I think even just people getting into this industry you have to understand that there's probably a lot more depth to the foundation and fundamental concepts that you probably should start with, because you're going to have an easier time. It is going to lengthen the amount of time it takes you to become a developer.

Don Hansen: 37:23

But I think what I love about your courses there are so many courses spitting out people who can kind of put together apps, and there are even courses just saying you know, just you know, learn Nextjs and you're going to be a full stack developer and be hireable with all these different startups, and that's just not the truth. I've been paying attention to a lot of the open positions and people are hiring people with a solid foundation and it's a hard thing to ingrain in new developers because you have a lot of content creators giving different advice on how to get in and how they got in in 2020 and 2021.

Don Hansen: 37:55

So I like your focus and I think it's what makes bootdev strong, but I'm kind of curious can even be separate from bootdev. What's your main frustration with aspiring backend developers? What do you feel like they just truly need to hear the most. If you could take that thought and shove it into their brains so they lived it, what would that thought be?

Lane Wagner: 38:23

I'm going to go a little bit more general than backend developers, because most of my frustrations are just about what I'll consider aspiring developers in general, and it's around expectation setting and I blame our industry, the ed tech and actually I'm not just going to blame us. You know what I'm not done. As Dennis Reynolds would say, I'm frustrated with the way we market computer science and developer education, as well as the way universities do it, because I think both of them, I think there's issues everywhere. Here's the take universities do it because I think both of them, I think there's issues everywhere. Here's the take um, learning to code and becoming a developer for a while was extremely lucrative and very cushy job. It's still an extremely lucrative, lucrative and very cushy job if you're goddamn good and like. That's the difference.

Lane Wagner: 39:19

There's a lot of people that think of becoming a developer as this binary thing where, like you get your first job as a developer and, like now you're a developer. But there is a huge difference between developers that are paid $400,000 a year to write really intense code that solves really hard problems for companies that are making like handfuls of money right, they have so much cash they don't know what to do with versus like you know, you know how to put HTML and CSS on a page for, like you know, a local, a local chiropractor's office or something like these are two very fundamentally different jobs, and so this is the reason like and not to disparage people that are, you know, you know WordPress developers, or HTML, CSS and WordPress, or I should say, and like front end frameworks. In my mind, like in the business industry, I would almost classify that type of work as like. If you want to get paid really well, you almost have to start specializing in marketing on top of just like web development skills, right, Because it's not just like, can you write some HTML and CSS? It's like you got to make something beautiful that converts.

Lane Wagner: 40:31

If what you're really passionate about is programming and you want to be a really good programmer, then you have to be a really good programmer so that you can get paid a lot of money to work on complex you know hard to fit in your head backend systems that are serving millions of requests, right? So it's just an expectation of like. If you're going to get into the industry, you really should like it at least at some level. I mean, I prefer to play Dota 2 than to write code. I still like to write code, though, and you've got to like it to some degree and you've got to go in with eyes wide open that, if you're going to really succeed, if this is going to be something again that makes you a lot of money, where you're able to demand really good lifestyle benefits from the companies you work at like aim to be a top 10 developer. Like don't don't aim for, you know, middle of the pack that's the problem.

Don Hansen: 41:30

I mean like, wow, yeah, that's the problem with so many aspiring developers.

Don Hansen: 41:35

It's that's the trick is getting them to see that, to want to be that right, and maybe time and experience, like getting some exposure into the industry, can kind of give you opportunities to meet good developers and you're like I want to be like him or her and like I aspire to be that person, and so I'm going to aim for that. But, man, a lot of people do need to hear that. I meet so many people, people that come into my live streams, people that I mentored, where they've set the bar so low for themselves and it's like sometimes it's self-confidence, like they're not capable of being a really good developer, even one day not today, one day day like they don't see themselves as that. But there are a lot of really brilliant developers that I don't think have like incredibly high iq above yours. They just put in the effort, they put in a lot of time, like almost everyone is capable if you enjoy it and you put the damn time into it. I wish more people understood that.

Lane Wagner: 42:41

And it's worth pointing out. I mentioned this before like I wouldn't say like I love programming in the sense that, like again, that I'd rather program in my free time than, like you know, play video games or hang out with my family or something. It's like that's not true. But it's a virtuous cycle that you want to get yourself into where, uh, as you get better at programming, you start liking programming more, right, and as you like programming more, you start getting better at programming faster. Uh, and that's not always obvious when you start out, because everything feels really hard. Uh, everything feels really hard and you know you get burnt out after two hours of banging your head on like one function that's not working. But it's worth noting that it doesn't always feel that way, like these days when I learn a new language. It's just fun Because I have that really foundational knowledge and those years of experience where it's just like oh, yeah, that's how that works, oh, that's cool.

Lane Wagner: 43:36

I like how they designed this. Like it's not this. Like, oh, how, yeah, that's how that works, oh, that's cool. I like how they designed this like it's not this. Like, oh, how, how am I going to write that? Like why is it not working like it does get a lot more fun as it goes along. So just I mean that's that's important to just understand, that you will overcome that feeling of it's really hard and that's making it not fun no, you're right, and like I mean, I don't know how relatable this is, but like, how do you build a habit?

Don Hansen: 44:01

You just do it and then you build a habit. You don't build a habit initially, right, and I've I've noticed that I've even people that CSS is a really good example, people that hate CSS. I tell them all the time. I'm like once you're good at it, you will like it. But back, a lot of backend developers will never believe me, but I hated it for the longest time and so many frontend developers hated CSS and maybe some people still will. That's fine, but I do feel like there's so many aspects of programming that get really fun and addicting and you wake up and you want to do it when you give yourself time, and I think some people just need to give themselves time. I think that's good advice, and I think some people just need to give themselves time. I think that's good advice. So, five years down the road, what are you doing? What does bootdev look like? What does backend banter.

Lane Wagner: 44:50

Look like that's a good question. I don't know. I know that a lot of creators. So it's a very like what I do day to day is a very creative work which I enjoy. So it's a very like what I do day-to-day is a very creative work which I enjoy. Um, like you know, writing courses, basically recording videos, um, building the platform, like it's all really fun stuff.

Lane Wagner: 45:06

But I will say I am going like really hard on it and I have been for almost four years. Uh, so like five years from now I would love to still be going hard, but, like, I guess what I'm saying is I hope I don't burn out at some point, because it's not. It's not, uh, you know the same pace at which I was working at my other jobs. It's not just a standard nine to five sort of thing. Um, so like, personally, I don't know, uh, where I'll be. I guess that just depends on how, how my mental state hangs on throughout the years, but where the product will be, I do know where I want that to go. I mean, the goal is to start with back-end development and make the best back-end development career path, so cover everything within the context of back-end development that we possibly can. At the moment I'm writing a course on static file servers. It's like how to use AWS S3 within the context of a web server that's serving like videos and, you know, streaming stuff and all that good stuff.

Lane Wagner: 46:08

So we have, we have a bunch of stuff, a bunch of content we have to make regarding back end development and then, like I mentioned, I want to expand into other programming languages. So you know, you're not just. You have the option essentially to learn the backend portion of the learning path in either Go or TypeScript or Python. That'll take a lot of work. The good news is we organize our concept or our courses by concept. So it's like functional programming is a course, happens to be in Python, but it's fairly easy for us. I should say. You know, it's like maybe a quarter of the work or a fifth of the work to take that and now offer it in a second programming language. It's like very similar concepts being taught in every lesson, just using a different syntax. So that's like step number two is offered in multiple languages, and then step number three would be to branch out into completely new career paths. So we'd probably start with like data engineering, data analysis, devops and really try to cover everything except front end. That's what it sounds like.

Don Hansen: 47:12

I love that when so there are different career paths. I've seen this. So again, I've seen a lot of coding bootcamps go down different paths and a lot of coding bootcamps the quality tends to go down when they branch way too far out of their original career path and your focus kind of really honing in on the backend. Um, I would expect the quality of your other paths to go down when you start branching into front end. I've seen it so many times. I'm sure you have a good curriculum, you have good instructors, but a lot of these coding bootcamps are really good or curriculum developers and they just it, just when it almost seems like your attention is just split and you stop caring about what truly you know got you motivated to build this thing from the ground up and like who you're trying to serve. So I hope you never go front end. I truly do and let you know, let other people kind of tackle the front end, but that that's awesome.

Lane Wagner: 48:13

I think it's mostly a question of of focus, like you said. So right now, there's five of us on like the product and engineering side and we're just focused on this backend developer path, and two of us are boot dev graduates. So two of the engineers working on the team one of them did the whole career path twice I mean, these are like top 0.1% students, like absolutely incredible. Shout out to Matt and dan. In fact, that was the one that, uh, introduced me to your youtube channel uh, he was watching.

Lane Wagner: 48:44

Uh, he was watching some don the developer, but uh, we're all focused on that. So if we're like, the more we spread out with content, we have to add people and give them the prerogative of focusing on that thing, which is fundamentally hard to do. So I agree, the quality does tend to go down as things grow, which is why we're just going to do it slowly.

Don Hansen: 49:08

I like it. So, for content creators and devs that are thinking about building their course and even, like actually me, who's thinking about building a course um, what advice would you give us? What advice would you wish you had known, you know, when you first started?

Lane Wagner: 49:34

the first. The first thing I'll say is like I'm biased because I'm not content creator first, course second. I'm course first, content creator second, which is a very different way of kind of looking at your. You know, frankly, your like media business and my belief is that if you're going to make a course, you should do it because you think there's something unique you're doing Right Again, to go back to what I was saying earlier, like there's so many courses out there, you really not only does the world not need just another course on X, like just another course on react or just another course on html, um, it's not just that the world doesn't need that. From like this, you know philosophical or like ethical standpoint, it's like no, you won't be able to sell it. Like there's so many of those, uh yeah, it's probably just not a good use of time. So it's it's really honing on something unique and and for us it's a little different because like yeah, there's a lot of Python courses out there we took this angle of just building a hyper interactive platform with all the gamification and stuff is like kind of what made it or what makes it unique.

Lane Wagner: 50:55

And if you are thinking about writing a course and you are a content creator and you do have a following. I mean, we partner with content creators. You know, primogen wrote both the Git courses on bootdev, tj, just finished our memory management course. So we do make most of our content in-house, but we do sort of selectively work with people to build stuff on platform.

Lane Wagner: 51:16

There's a lot of caveats though. For example, you know, if you build your own course and self-publish, you have full control. Obviously, if you build your own course and put it on Udemy, you have mostly full control right. So it's a video, you upload it. We're kind of control freaks in the sense that we do like heavy reviews, we're constantly updating and maintaining um. You know, since the primogen published his git course, we've added lessons to it, uh, stuff like that. So it's like um working with us. You do give up a bit of control. I mean, we'll say, of course, that it's all in the pursuit of of quality and better material at the end of the day, but it is, you know it is a little different okay, I think that's really good advice.

Don Hansen: 51:59

I appreciate that yeah you're right, um, just from my own thoughts. I mean, I've reviewed so many courses and there aren't a lot of unique ones, and sometimes maybe people need to sit on their idea a little bit more, like, don't just build a course, because that's the thing to Um, really sit on your idea and flush that out, brainstorm and cause there are a lot of opportunities. Like a lot of people are still struggling as aspiring developers, which means there are a lot of opportunities to catch their attention and do something unique where their previous course didn't catch that attention. Um, so yeah, that's good advice.

Lane Wagner: 52:37

I'll just say so, yeah, that's good advice. I'll just say there's one more thing on that. Um, yeah, and to get like really scrooge mcduck about like how this whole industry works, um, because I mean, your audience is really smart. I've seen some of your videos like they, they kind of get how this works and and I'll kind of pull back the curtain a little bit and talk a bit about how, like the content creation game works. Like when you have a following on YouTube, the big following, let's say, you know, 500,000 views per video or a million views per video. Like you make money from ads on YouTube. So your primary quote, unquote customer is whoever the hell is buying ads on YouTube, which, like you, don't really have control over YouTube, just feeds ads. Um, that doesn't monetize very well. Like, considering you're getting a million views per video, you're not actually making all that much money through just native AdSense, which is why so many creators launch a course or sell a product, maybe partner with a brand. Right, it's why Mr Beast does Feastables and Logan Paul does Prime. You can get more money by selling your own thing or by partnering with a company that sells something.

Lane Wagner: 53:44

So here's kind of my again very biased, very selfish take on how I think about the coding education industry. I want to keep working with great content creators who do you know edutainment, like interesting technical content on youtube, because I want to focus on making courses. I I don't want to really build a big youtube channel. It's not what I'm passionate about, it's not my core expertise, so, like I just want to build a really really really good course platform, um, and I like partnering with creators for basically the reverse reason of that, because I I also get frustrated when a creator launches a course, what I would consider to be like a low effort course, just because it's going to do all day, every day, and and that's kind of what we're trying to do. More broadly speaking, in tech, youtube is, is, is, is make really high quality courses and then kind of partner with creators on the distribution side. Sorry to nerd out about business, but that's uh, that's the plan.

Don Hansen: 54:52

It's fascinating and so, like you know, if any other content creators are watching this kind of a call to action like what, do you have any courses you're hoping to get built? I think the question is gonna be like, well, you know, what do you want from me? What can I build?

Lane Wagner: 55:05

yeah, that's a great question. So first thing I'll say is like we're this is gonna make me sound like an asshole, and maybe I am but like we're really picky, uh, and and like I said, we're not udemy, so like udemy will just like let anyone upload a course, um, and like they have like 10 000 react courses I don't know how many they actually have, right but like you could just upload stuff, um, for us. It's. It's a very deep partnership of like we are writing this thing with you, we're helping you produce it, like all that kind of stuff. So it's like a it's a much longer and deeper conversation, um, and we are building curriculum.

Lane Wagner: 55:42

So it's like what do we need next? So like, right now we're mostly getting the go stuff converted to typescript, um, and so we're shipping like a new javascript course and a new typescript course. But what I'll say is just like we love working with creators, whether you write a course for us or just we have like an affiliate deal. So anyone that's interested in working with us hit us up, happy to chat. Maybe it makes sense to write a course, maybe it doesn't, but I at least like to chat with everyone.

Don Hansen: 56:10

Okay, all right. Well, I appreciate you sharing that. That's pretty much it, and I appreciate you nerding out on the business stuff. You know, part of this conversation was a little bit selfish. I was really curious how you ran things. And you know, and I've gotten to, I follow you on Twitter and I see what you post and you have a lot of integrity and you truly do care about a lot of people trying to just better their lives, which is awesome. It's another reason why I wanted to talk to you again, but I'm out of questions. You gave a lot of information. I appreciate that. So you know, if people want to reach out to you and anything else you want to share, where could people find you?

Lane Wagner: 56:46

Thanks, yeah, and likewise, by the way, like I said, matt, our one of our star students on boot dev, now one of our star employees, a huge fan of the channel, and he put me in contact with you. You do great stuff um appreciate that, yeah, um, if anyone wants to reach, I mean obviously like boot dev is there. In fact you have a promo code like use don's promo code, is it? Is it just don the developer? That's it you encourage me to just do don the dev.

Lane Wagner: 57:15

But I stuck with don the developer, yeah don the developer, don't, don't typo it 25 off, um. So yeah, if you want to, if you want bootdev, check it out, um. But if you want to contact me personally, I will say I'm. I'm getting worse and worse about responding to dms as the days go by, but the best place is discord. So bootdev slash community um. Other than that, you know you can shoot me a Twitter DM or a LinkedIn DM. Can't guarantee I'll respond, but if you make it interesting, I probably will. I get too many to respond to all of them, but I will. I'll do my best.

Don Hansen: 57:49

Okay, that sounds good, all right. Well, I know a lot of bootdevs audience is probably watching. Probably got served to some of my audience but, uh, for a lot of aspiring back-end developers, um, you know, at the very least, feel free to check out lane's content. He brings on a lot of, a lot of content critters, a lot of really good developers and content critters. You probably watch on it, you know, a weekly basis. But, um, yeah, lane, seriously, uh, stick around just for a couple minutes, but thank you so much for coming on again absolutely thanks, don.