I earned the level of Archmage on boot.dev within 30 days. Boot.dev is a website promising to teach back-end software development with online courses styled after an online video game. To reach Archmage students must earn experience through completing lessons. While the amount of courses it takes to reach that level varies, for me to reach archmage I completed just under 75% of the lessons on the website. Boot.dev is geared towards individuals who have no programming experience, and expects it to take several months to reach Archmage. To further encourage students to reach Archmage, boot.dev offers to mail a physical archmage coin to students who reach that level. Having experience as a full-stack developer, I decided to attempt to reach archmage in 30 days.

I was able to complete several lessons and earn experience before I was blocked by a paywall. I was initially shocked at the $50 per month price tag but as I got to know the platform, that is more than fair. And to be fair, other websites offering similar training charge a comparable amount.

The introductory courses have two forms of assignments, multiple choice and coding. In Multiple choice assignments the student must choose the correct answer from a list. The coding assignments have a section explaining the assignment and teaching the vital concepts, and a section for typing code. When the student is done writing their code, they can run an automated test to verify the code is working correctly. This automated test is simply genius and the reason why I highly recommend boot.dev. The value of this fast feed-back loop is that if there is something I am doing wrong, I know it immediately and not after it is buried under several pages of work. The only downside to this, is that it lacks the repetition of traditional assignments. But the team at boot.dev have what they call project courses which reinforce the regular courses. Projects on boot.dev are much more like the traditional programming assignments from my college experience. The student is given a detailed list of requirements, a few pointers, and let loose to write the code.

Boot.dev has several mechanics to help students earn more experience. There is a daily streak bonus for completing lessons every day, each day the student completes at least one course, this bonus increases by 1%. So after 29 days on boot.dev I was earning 29% bonus experience for every lesson I completed (this does not apply to the experience earned for completing a course or project). Students can also use “potions” which increase experience earned by 25% for 1 hour (for my gamer friends: this does not stack, the daily and potion bonus operate on the base experience). Students can earn various items, including potions, but answering 15 questions in a row correctly. Upon completing 15 in a row, the student earns a chest with random rewards. A seer stone will reveal the answer, a shield will protect your correct answer streak, salmon will unlock the ai assistant to help you with the assignment, potions will reward 25% bonus experience for an hour, and gems will let you purchase any of the above from a gamified store.

There are “daily quests” students can accept to earn another chest, they must earn a set amount of experience in 24 hours to complete the quest. There are also so-called boss fights which occur once a month. The health of the boss is a meter students across the whole platform attempt to fill all the way to the top. While I never felt truly engaged with this mechanic, completing lessons during a boss fight seemed to give a 30-50% bonus experience for no other reason than that the boss fight was going on. Utilizing these mechanics was vital for me to reach Archmage in 30 days.

Due to weather related damage, during the second half of June my internet was intermittent. This led me to complete courses on my phone. I was pleasantly surprised by how mobile friendly boot.dev is, until I noticed that on the mobile website there is no way to accept quests or use potions. This was a devastating loss of experience for my goal.

I found some lessons with vague instructions, some were a lower quality, and some with practically no guidance. For some of those lower quality lessons, I used several Seer stones. I really like Seer stones because they give the student a limited ability to give up on a lesson and move on. Sure, if abused the student can miss important concepts but let’s not be so conceited to suppose everything has to be learned the hard way. Sometimes it is best to just correct the student. By using game mechanics to limit the number of Seer stones the boot.dev team has created a great compromise. But even with Seer stones, I struggled with the project courses.

If I was not trying to reach Archmage I would have loved the project courses, but I dreaded them instead. Per lesson project courses gave more experience but they took me so much longer it was much slower. I began doing them one week in. I have a day job and work 40 hours a week and volunteer on Sundays (which often bleed into my Saturdays), so I was working late into the night to complete these courses. By a week and a half in, I was exhausted, struggling through courses, and was ready to give up. My initial goal was to earn a set amount of experience each day, at that point I realized I couldn’t do that during the work week. I changed my plans and aimed to do even more during the weekends so I could sleep longer during weekdays. The weekends were still long nights but with this new plan I pushed through until the last three days.

In the days leading up to reaching archmage, I wondered if I would be teased for this endeavor. Boot.dev presents itself as a game, often in humorous or creative ways, and does not appear professional. There is no real accountability to ensure students are not cheating. It has no institutional credibility or any form of proctored certification. Boot.dev is an exceptional platform for learning back-end development but it does not have the reputation of an institution. For now, I hope boot.dev greatly expands on their content. In the long term, I hope they can introduce proctored, or in other ways verified, certification programs and form an institution that employers can trust. As for the rest of the academic world, I hope they take good notes because what boot.dev has created is seriously good.

I broke with the plan and stayed up late Tuesday night, June 24th, to achieve archmage. I did it in 26 days, and I felt relieved. I love games, and when I reach a high level there is a rush of joy and excitement, but not this time. I felt relieved followed by remorse and wonder, in my own thoughts: “That was hard, I’m glad it’s over. What have I done with my time? Was this even worth it? Who will truly care about an examless, institution-less education platform?” But these thoughts were overshadowed by exhaustion and fatigue of the long days and nights of programming for the past 26 days. I slept well that night.

Reaching archmage on boot.dev pushed me to the limit of my capabilities. And for me, it was pushing my limit that was the true achievement. It wasn’t about winning the race, it was about giving it all I had and crossing the finish line.

Timeline Tables

I started making tables after the first few days to track my progress, so here they are.