How to Prep Your Desktop for Coding Projects: A Guide for My Programming Students

To set you up for success for every project and tutorial I've created this guide to get you started. Programming is learned through active learning so be sure to follow along in the videos and guides that I publish or build your own version afterwards.

I'll look to update this guide over time with better clarity as more projects come out on the website

1. Download Visual Studio Code
2. Create a GitHub account to save your projects
3. Set up Git to push your projects to GitHub
4. Know how to use your terminal

Using the terminal is often much faster than using the GUI. I'd like to breakdown the commands I'll usually use.

• For every project I'll create a folder on my desktop (Command + Space on Mac, search "Terminal", cd Desktop, mkdir enter-project-name-here, code project-name)

These steps get you to open your folder directly in Visual Studio Code. Once you set up Git + GitHub you'll regularly use the following commands:

1. git add *
2. git commit - m "enter message here"
3. git push origin main or git push if you have that abbreviation set up
4. git status to confirm that your tree is clean and you have no more changes to send to GitHub

Add extensions to Visual Studio Code for a better work experience

• Set up automatic formatting by following steps from How to Automatically Format and Align Code in VS Code with Prettier
• Set up automatic refresh by following steps from How to Automatically Refresh Your VSCode Project While Developing

How to speed up your Visual Studio Code workflow

• Check out Work Faster in Visual Studio Code with Shortcuts

Add a CSS Reset whenever a project involves CSS

• Check out What Is a CSS Reset and Why You Should Use One Learn