June taught the platform to grade work. July asked the obvious next question: so what? A grade that only exists inside our product is worth very little to the person doing the hiring.
So July went on making the proof leave the building — and on fixing the places where the platform was quietly punishing learners for experimenting.
New
Verifiable certificates with a QR code
A certificate now has a public verification URL and a QR code. Anyone — a recruiter, a hiring manager, someone in an interview panel — can check it with no account, no login, and no request to us.
That last part is the point. A credential a company has to take our word for isn't a credential; it's a claim. This one they can check themselves in about four seconds.
A certificate, verified with no account and no login.
Free practice runs on exercises
Only Submit consumes an attempt. Running your code to see what it does costs nothing.
Before this, an attempt counter that ticked down every time you pressed run taught exactly the wrong lesson — that experimenting is expensive and guessing carefully is cheap. Real engineering is the other way round.
Alongside it: the number of submissions remaining and the time they reset are both visible, and a hint shows its price in MB before you reveal it rather than after.
150 MB for passing a mock interview
Passing an interview previously earned nothing at all, which was hard to defend given it's the hardest thing on the platform to fake. It now pays 150 MB. A first booking also no longer burns the free trial.
Report a problem from inside the product
A feedback dialog that reaches the team immediately — including from an error screen. If something breaks badly enough to show an error boundary, that is precisely the moment a learner should be able to tell us, and precisely the moment they previously couldn't.
Browse the interview catalogue without an account
The interview template catalogue is readable before signing up, the same way courses and projects became in April.
Improved
- Every kind of completion counts. Project completions feed League XP, streaks increment on path completions, and the reward currency is called MB everywhere instead of three different names in three different places.
- GitHub connections that repair themselves. If a connection expires mid-project you get a clear reconnect banner and a popup reconnect, without losing your place.
- Pages show their shape while loading rather than a bare spinner, and moving between steps makes one request instead of two.
- Bigger, more readable text across the platform — larger body copy, clearer page and card titles.
- Copy that sounds like a person. A pass over the interface language for consistency and tone.
- Workshop certificates issue automatically: an attendee gets an account, an enrolment and a certificate verifiable at a public URL.
What This Set Up
By the end of July a learner could point at something outside our walls: a certificate a stranger can verify, a portfolio that opens without a login, and project code sitting in their own GitHub.
One gap remained. Everything the platform could grade, it graded through HTTP — which is fine if the thing you're building answers requests, and no use at all if it's a command-line program. August closed that.
The full year is written up in how we rebuilt Masteringbackend in 2026.
