March is the month the architecture stopped being a plan and became a thing a learner could open. It's also a strangely shaped month: a burst of work in the first week, nothing for a fortnight, then the biggest feature of the quarter landing in the last four days.
That last four days is learning paths.
New
Learning paths
A path is one ordered route through a discipline. Not a folder of courses, not a recommended reading list — a single timeline you work down, where the next thing is already decided.
What makes it a path rather than a playlist is that the timeline mixes 7 kinds of work: videos, articles, quizzes, exercises, projects, mock interviews and bootcamps. A learner moves from watching, to reading, to being tested, to writing code, to shipping something, to sitting an interview — without leaving the sequence or deciding what comes next.
Sequencing a career became our problem in March. It had been the learner's until then.
A path timeline, showing mixed kinds of work in a single order. Design as it stands today.
Paths also got recommendations — what to take next once you finish one — so the sequence doesn't just end.
Reviews and format indicators
Detail pages now show learner reviews, and mark what format each piece of content is in before you open it. A learner deciding whether to commit to something long can see both what other people made of it and what kind of work it actually involves.
Bootcamp leaderboard
A cohort board for bootcamps, scored from the MB points attached to each lesson rather than a separate tally. It filters by cohort, so learners are ranked against the people they started with rather than everyone who has ever enrolled.
Automated lifecycle emails
A full set of scheduled jobs and the emails they drive: follow-ups, notifications, certificate delivery, appreciation notes and bootcamp reminders. Before this, an email either fired at the moment of an action or didn't exist — nothing could reach a learner a week later.
Payment check before enrolment
Enrolment now verifies payment before it completes, rather than after.
Improved
- Quizzes became assignments. A rename that reflects what they actually are, followed by assignment support through bootcamps.
- Bootcamp upsell. The upsell email now offers a PRO subscription rather than a single course — one decision instead of a series of them.
- Live sessions and graduates. Both surfaces reworked.
- Payments. Course and bootcamp payment flows corrected, and the payment link fixed.
- The watch page and the client-side store were both cleaned up.
- Speed. More database indexes, including one specifically for the bootcamp board.
Fixed
- Week and lesson creation failing when several were created at once.
- The bootcamp leaderboard reporting 0 lessons for everybody — it was counting across all cohorts instead of the learner's own.
- A numeric overflow on large ids.
- Debug logging left on in the leaderboard path.
What This Set Up
With paths in place, the platform could finally answer “what should I do next?” with something better than a catalog. What it still couldn't answer was “is what I just did any good?” — a project was still finished when the learner said it was finished. Closing that gap took the whole of June.
The full year is written up in how we rebuilt Masteringbackend in 2026.
