Title: 10
Course: Start programming with Python in 10 steps

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This is it. The final thing you need to learn to be a pro-programmer. Not really, but it's pretty useful stuff that every programmer should know. By now, you may be used to working on your programs alone in front of your computer, but real-life programming is often done in a team. In order to be as efficient as possible, we need ways to make sure that everyone is on the same page at any given time, and we need backups that we can go back to if anything fails. That’s why in the last step of this guide, we’re going to talk about virtual environments and code repositories.

👉    8 things to know at this step

1. Python libraries typically rely on other Python libraries, which are usually called dependencies.
2. The best way to have all the needed dependencies in place is to create a virtual environment.
3. To use the libraries installed in an environment, you need to activate the environment.
4. It’s good to have a separate environment for each project that you work on.
5. To share your code with other people, you use code repositories like GitHub, which also keep track of all the changes made to the code and make sure people don’t accidentally overwrite each other’s contributions.
6. Your local computer communicates with GitHub (or other such repositories) via a special program called Git, which you need to install and configure.
7. Git is typically run from the command line, but there are also apps for it.

🧑‍🎓    Learn actively

▶️   Set up your first project folder and virtual environment by following the steps in this document: Creating a project folder.pdf. As you can see, we will be working with the command line rather than notebooks in this step.
❗  Since we are talking about doing a whole installation of Python with all its libraries for each project, you could be worried about space, and you would be right! Luckily, all of this installation is created automatically from the requirements.txt file. This means that you only need to backup or share this small file in order to backup or share the Python installation.

▶️   Make your first steps with Git with this document: Using Git.pdf
❗  Note that GitHub is a very popular option for managing versions and contributing your code, but it's not the only one! You are very likely to encounter other repositories over time, namely GitLab.