Getting ready for this course

Get to know a texteditor of your choice

Every computer likely has some basic text editor installed. Notepad/Muistio (Windows — “Muistio” is the Finnish name for the same built-in app), TextEdit (Mac), gedit (Linux) or something along those lines. There also exist various command line editors, like nano, vim and emacs. The choice is up to you, the only important thing is that you can save a plain text file (e.g. .txt extension) with it. Also other tools like Word, LibreOffice, Google docs can do this. Though we recommend to get familiar with something simpler. For now it is enough to know how to open your editor of choice, edit a file and save it with .txt extension.

VS Code and VSCodium

For a more feature-rich editing experience, you can also install one of these popular editors:

  • Visual Studio Code (VSCode) — A powerful, free source code editor by Microsoft, widely used in research and software development. Supports syntax highlighting, extensions, Git integration, and a built-in terminal.

  • VSCodium — A community-maintained binary distribution of the same VS Code source code, but without Microsoft’s telemetry and proprietary components. It uses an open-source extension marketplace (Open VSX). Choose VSCodium if you prefer not to share usage data with Microsoft.

Both work identically for the purposes of this course.

GitHub account

In this course, we use the public GitHub service and you need an account at https://github.com and a supported web browser. Basic GitHub accounts are free.

If you are concerned about the personal information to reveal to GitHub, for example how to keep your email address private, please review these instructions for keeping your email address private provided at GitHub.

We are trying to make it possible to follow this course also with other Git hosting services but this is work in progress.

Create a GitHub account

  1. Go to https://github.com.

  2. Click on the “Sign up” at the right-top corner.

  3. Enter your username of your choice (if it is already used, you will get some suggestions), email address, and password.

  4. Follow further instruction and verify your account.

GitHub may require you to enable multi-factor authentication (MFA). This is generally a good thing, but may take some time to set up. Luckily, you probably don’t have to do this immediately. If you are prompted to enable MFA before the end of the course, follow GitHub’s instructions since they are usually pretty good.

How to verify that this worked

If you can log in to https://github.com, you should be good to go.