January opened the year on the Grow phase, which was a deliberate choice. Interview performance is the clearest signal of whether everything else on the platform is working, and it's the hardest thing to fake. So the first thing we built in 2026 was a way to practise one.
Alongside it, bootcamps got the structure they'd been missing, and courses started measuring progress instead of assuming it.
New
Mock interviews
A learner can book a mock interview, sit it, and manage every session from one place. Interviews carry a status, so a booked session, a session in progress and a finished one are different things rather than one undifferentiated list. Finished interviews produce a summary, and that summary can be exported as a PDF.
Interview templates became shareable. A template can be made public, and instructors with the right role can author their own rather than working from a fixed set.
This is the feature the rest of the year kept returning to. It was rebuilt in June as a full AI interview — chat, code editor, whiteboard, and a report that scores every answer separately — and the picture below is what a finished interview looks like today.
The interview report as it works today, after June's rebuild.
Bootcamp event reminders
Live bootcamp sessions now send a reminder 10 minutes before they start. Ten minutes is short on purpose. A reminder a day early gets forgotten; a reminder as somebody is about to miss the thing is the one that works.
Course enrollment tracking
Enrollments are now recorded properly and progress is calculated from them, rather than being inferred. This is plumbing, and it's the plumbing every progress bar, certificate threshold and completion state later in the year was built on top of.
Improved
- Bootcamp week navigation. Weeks are ordered, navigable and individually completable. A learner can move to next week, see which weeks are done, and land on the right lesson day rather than scrolling a flat list.
- Bootcamp enrollment, simplified. Fewer steps to join, and a clear notice up front that sessions are recorded — which is the question everybody asked before signing up for a live cohort.
- Bootcamp emails, cleaned up. The reminder and enrollment templates were rewritten to say one thing each.
- Mobile. A pass over the interview and bootcamp surfaces on small screens.
Fixed
- Interview summaries that ran too long are now trimmed to a readable length.
- Week completion state no longer drifts out of sync with the lessons inside the week.
- Cross-origin checks on the API were tightened.
What This Set Up
Nothing in January could tell a learner whether their work was any good — it could only tell them what they'd done. Mock interviews were the first surface that returned a judgment, and getting one working made the case for everything that followed: leaderboards in February, and eventually a platform that grades project code on our own servers.
The full year is written up in how we rebuilt Masteringbackend in 2026.
