A beginner’s guide to learning to code with GitHub Codespaces
When you’re new to coding, it’s easy to get stuck completing endless tutorials. You can apply what you’ve learned (and learn even more) through GitHub Codespaces. The best part is you don’t need a powerful computer to get started.
It doesn’t matter what stage you’re at in your software engineering career, there’s always something new to learn. As a beginner, it’s so easy to spend more time-consuming tutorials on how to code rather than actually putting it into practice. “See one, do one, teach one” is a learning methodology that suggests effective learning happens when you observe, apply, and then teach a new concept. When you’re new to a programming concept, the “see one, do one, and teach one” is extremely valuable in building your development skills. However, one of the reasons we got stuck in the observation phase is that we don’t know how to apply it. “What projects do I build?” is a common question that new developers ask me. And I’ll admit, I sometimes find myself asking the same question.
Fortunately,
GitHub Codespaces
is an effective tool that can help you apply what you’ve learned. Let’s discover how to learn new languages and frameworks with GitHub Codespaces, together.
Click this
link
and choose “Use this template” to enter the codespace that I’ve created specially for you! Once our codespace is fully loaded, you will see a live preview of your web app on a tab titled, “Simple Browser.” (If you don’t see the “Simple Browser” tab yet, give it a few minutes to load.) It should look like the image below:
Scroll down to the bottom of the page, and you will see the codespace you created. It might have a silly name. GitHub Codespace automatically generates names for each codespace as a form of identification. My codespace is named “ubiquitous acorn.”
Click the three dots on the right-hand side and choose the option “Publish to new repository.”
Here, you can give your project a more identifiable name, make the project public, and view your repository with the button “See repository.”
This will lead you to your repository on GitHub. It will show the different files within the project, too. You can share the link to your repository for other developers to collaborate with you or explore your codebase!
Quickstart templates
include boilerplate code for some of the most common application frameworks, including Next.js, React.js, Django, Express, Ruby on Rails, Preact, Flask, and Jupyter Notebook. These templates provide developers with a sandbox to build, test, and debug applications in a codespace. This means you don’t have to start from scratch with coding because we already have a working project that you can enhance into the project you’re envisioning. You can use templates to understand how developers structure their projects written in various programming languages. And you can use it to understand how different files communicate with each other.
For example, I’ve always wanted to learn more about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, but I had no clue where to start. I used a Jupyter Notebooks template to
generate AI images
. The template already had all the tools I needed. I just had to change a few lines of code.
