Yin Yin Chan

Getting Started

Github Codespaces

1. Create a new Github repository and initialize with Readme and python .gitignore.
2. Clone the repository into a Codespace
   • Click on “<> Code”
   • Click on “Create codespace on main”
   • This should launch the browser-based workspace

We use Github Codespaces to remove setup friction and initialize the project from a standardized cloud setup. Codespaces comes with a preconfigured development environment without us having to configure it on our local desktop. The workflow here will launch a codespace, but we will use a desktop IDE (VS Code).

Visual Studio Code

The next set of instructions assumes you have VS Code already installed on your local machine.

1. From the browser-based codespace,
   • Click on the hamburger menu icon
   • Click on “Open VS Code Desktop”
2. Open the terminal:
   • Go to “Terminal”
   • Click “New Terminal”

We can run this codespace on the desktop using Visual Studio Code to avoid lag (as opposed to running it in-browser) and for a more productive workflow.

Docker, Python, uv

We use Docker to make our program portable.

1. Docker is pre-installed by default, but let’s check. And here’s a Docker CLI cheatsheet

   docker --version
   

2. Install python onto your codespace and check the python version

   apt update && apt install python3
   python3 -V
   

3. I prefer to use uv as the virtual environment for package management. I don’t want to install packages globally on my system.

   pip install uv