Week 01 — Development Environment & Tooling

You can't build good things with bad tools. Week 1 is about installing, configuring, and actually understanding the tools you'll use every single day for the next 7 weeks — and for the rest of your career.

What You'll Learn This Week

By the end of this week you will be able to:

• Set up a professional Python development environment using VS Code + UV (the fastest package manager in 2026)
• Write Bash scripts that automate boring work
• Use Git and GitHub not as a magic "save button" but as tools you fully understand
• Store and query data with SQLite using the modern sqlite-utils + datasette workflow
• Test APIs with curl, httpie, and Postman
• Intercept and mock browser network traffic with Requestly
• Move fluently between JSON, YAML, TOML, Markdown, and Base64
• Host static sites for free on GitHub Pages
• Produce professional PDFs with LaTeX (Overleaf + pandoc)

Topics

#	Topic	What it is	Why it matters
1	VS Code	Microsoft's free code editor	The de-facto editor of our industry
2	UV — Python Package Manager	Rust-powered pip + venv + pyenv replacement	10–100× faster than pip
3	Bash Scripting	The Unix shell language	Glue for everything on Linux / macOS / CI
4	Git & GitHub	Version control + collaboration	Every real project lives in Git
5	SQLite	File-based SQL database	Ships with Python; used by Firefox, iOS, airplanes
6	HTTP Clients	curl, httpie, Postman	Talk to any API before you write a line of Python
7	Requestly	Browser HTTP interceptor	Mock/modify/redirect traffic without touching backend
8	Data Formats	JSON, YAML, TOML, Markdown, Base64, Unicode	The vocabulary of all modern APIs
9	GitHub Pages	Free static site hosting from GitHub	Publish docs, portfolios, apps
10	LaTeX	Professional typesetting	Publication-quality PDFs + math

Labs

You will build these three labs — each one ships something real to the internet.

1. Lab 1.1 — Publish a Python library to PyPI using UV
2. Lab 1.2 — UV CLI tool + LaTeX documentation PDF on GitHub Pages
3. Lab 1.3 — Bash automation script — daily project summary

How to work through this week

Read the topic, do the 5-minute mini-exercise at the bottom of each page, then move to the next. At the end of the week, complete the three labs. Finally, write a Discourse blog post about one concept you learned — teaching it back is the best way to learn.

Required Software Checklist

Before starting, install these on your machine:

Tool	macOS	Linux (Ubuntu)	Windows
VS Code	brew install --cask visual-studio-code	sudo snap install --classic code	Download installer
Git	brew install git	sudo apt install git	winget install Git.Git
UV	curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh	Same	powershell -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"
GitHub CLI	brew install gh	sudo apt install gh	winget install GitHub.cli
sqlite-utils	uv tool install sqlite-utils	Same	Same
httpie	brew install httpie	sudo apt install httpie	winget install HTTPie.HTTPie

Windows users

We strongly recommend using WSL2 (Ubuntu) on Windows. Most of the course assumes a Unix-like shell. Install WSL via wsl --install in an admin PowerShell and then do everything inside Ubuntu.

Mindset for Week 1

Most students rush to the "AI stuff" in later weeks and skip the fundamentals. Don't. Every hour you invest in mastering your editor, your shell, and Git pays back 100× in the weeks ahead. When the professor says "build a RAG chatbot", you don't want to be fighting with virtual environments — you want that to be muscle memory.

How to get help

• Read the official docs first — they're almost always better than Stack Overflow.
• Ask good questions on Discourse.
• --help is your friend: every CLI tool documents itself.