1.7 Optional Exercises
Last updated on 2025-04-01 | Edit this page
Estimated time: 45 minutes
Overview
Questions
- How can I further fine-tune my coding environment?
Objectives
- Explore different options for your coding environment.
This episode has some optional exercises for Section 1. The exercises have an explorative nature, so feel free to go off in any direction that interests you. You will be looking at some tools that either complement or are alternatives to those already introduced. Even if you find something that you really like, for the sake of following through with the course, we still recommend sticking with the tools that we introduced prior to this episode and then switching to something else afterwards.
Exercise: Apply to your own project(s)
Apply what you learned in this section to your own project(s). This is the time to ask any questions of your instructors, helpers or fellow learners. Everyone has different preferences for tooling, so getting input from experienced developers is a great opportunity to learn new things or different perspectives.
Exercise: Try out different Integrated Development Environments
Install different Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) and test them out. Which one do you like the most and why?
Some suggestions to try:
- Visual Studio Code, with setup instructions in the Extras of this course
- Atom
- Sublime Text
- RStudio
When compared to PyCharm, the IDEs listed above are advanced source code editors capable of functioning as IDEs. To function as an IDE, you have to manually install plugins for these tools to obtain more advanced features - such as support for a specific programming language or unit testing.
What do you prefer, a lot of tooling out of the box or a lightweight editor with optional extensions?
If you want an even more lightweight setup you can try out these configurable source code editors:
Exercise: Customise the command line tool
You can customise the command line tool or use alternatives to
bash, such as:
- Bash Prompt Generator - it lets you try out different prompts, depending on the information you want displayed.
- z, a simple tool to more quickly move around directories.
- Z shell (zsh), a shell designed for interactive use.
-
Oh My ZSH, which is a theming and
package manager of the
zshterminal. - fish, a smart and user-friendly command line shell.
Exercise: Try out different virtual environment managers
So far we have used venv, but there are other virtual
environment managers for Python:
- Poetry, which we will explore using in Section 4.
-
conda, which is part of Anaconda Distribution.
Anaconda is widely used in academia, but the current license does not allow use for research in most circumstances. An open-source alternative is mini-forge.
Exercise: Customise pylint
Tell pylint to accept the maximum line length of 100
characters instead of the default 80.
Hint: find out different ways in which you can configure
pylint (e.g. via pylint command line interface
or its configuration file).