Hi! Welcome to the Data Science onboarding. To help you become more familiar with our current stack, we are proposing a simple project. It is composed by a series of Jupyter Notebooks with instructions and exercises.
Firstly, you may install some tools:
Before installing, check if you already have them in your computer. Now, let's go to our next step: using git and cloning this repository.
In order to update and manipulate the files in this repository in your personal computer, you should clone it.
At the top of the page, you will find a green button code, where you will see the https link of the repo. Copy the link, go to your terminal, find a place to put your repo and type:
> git clone <repo link>
If you do not feel comfortable using git and GitHub, we invite you to take a look at these resources:
- https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/set-up-git
- https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials
- https://learngitbranching.js.org/
Great! Now, you can access the local repository.
You can see that there are many files and folders in the repository.
- README.md: this file you are reading :)
- onboard-part-1.ipynb, onboard-part-2.ipynb, onboard-part-3.ipynb: the Jupyter Notebooks we will use during the onboarding
- .gitignore: this file is used to indicate which files and folders from this repo should not be pushed into the remote repository. Cache files and copies of databases that you are using locally are, for instance, contents you may not add in the repo
- data/: contain the dataset we will use in the project
- autocorrectors/: contain functions that will be used along the notebooks. Do not change its content!
As your first task, we invite you to do your first commit in GitHub. So open your repository through the terminal by typing
> code .
It will open a VSCode window. Now, find the README file and update it (for example, change the title of the page by adding your name to it). To add your changes to the remote repository (on GitHub), save the updated file (cmd + s), go to the terminal and type:
> git checkout -b feature/onboard-issues
> git add .
> git commit -m "short message explaining the update you did"
> git push origin feature/onboard-issues
The first line creates a new branch in your repository. This means that your changes will be added to this new branch instead of the main one. This is a pattern we follow so we do not mess things up. We only add our changes to the main branch when we are sure that our code works fine and we can put it on production. To name a branch, we also follow some rules: before the slash (/), we indicate what type of issue we are going to solve in the branch (add a new feature, fix a problem, correct some bug,...). After the slash, we indicate what we are actually doing (which feature we are creating, or which problem we are fixing).
The second line adds the changes we made in the README file to a "staging area". The third line actually saves your changes. the -m allows you to add a message to your commit. It is useful and important to indicate what you have done in the commit and helps you to "know where you are" in the commits history when you are doing more complicated operations.
The last line pushes your changes to the remote repository, to the branch indicated at the end of the command.
Now that you know how to commit your changes, open your notebook locally and let's start coding :)
It is easier to use Notebooks in other applications instead of VSCode. Let's try Jupyter Notebook for now. Open the terminal and type:
> jupyter notebook
It will open a window in your browser so you can navigate through your folders. Whenever you need to commit or push your changes, open a new terminal window and type the same git commands used beforehand.
Spoiler: at this onboarding version, we will be using the Palmer Penguins dataset
Horst AM, Hill AP, Gorman KB (2020). palmerpenguins: Palmer
Archipelago (Antarctica) penguin data. R package version 0.1.0.
https://allisonhorst.github.io/palmerpenguins/. doi:
10.5281/zenodo.3960218.