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GitHub Copilot

Optimized GitHub Copilot

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Harnessing GenAI for production-ready software

Course outcomes

  • Enhance your ability to craft and calibrate prompts to optimize the value of GitHub Copilot and AI-based tools
  • Learn how to use GitHub Copilot to write code faster and with greater accuracy, reducing development time and improving overall code quality
  • Gain practical skills in integrating GitHub Copilot into your existing development process, from initial design and prototyping to testing and deployment

Course description

Are you a casual or self-taught user of GitHub Copilot? Are you a developer who often wonders how other developers complete tasks so swiftly? Whatever the case, there are tasks in the development process that can be optimized or even removed with correctly calibrated use of GitHub Copilot.

Join expert Steffen Bjerkenås to participate in a software project, from start to finish, with GitHub Copilot. Your tasks include brainstorming a new idea, scaffolding the project outline, writing the source code, creating tests and troubleshooting errors, documenting your codebase, and provisioning cloud resources using terminal commands. You’ll come away knowing how to make GitHub Copilot your ideal everyday coding assistant for all your least favorite tasks.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Craft better prompts to optimize the value of GitHub Copilot
  • Reduce time spent on setting up a new project from scratch
  • Improve the quality and test coverage of your code
  • Reduce the effort spent on documenting your code
  • Onboard onto an unknown codebase faster
  • Spend less time crafting and understanding shell commands
  • Improve your code reviews
  • Learn new skills and technologies without context switching
  • Customize the GitHub Copilot experience in your IDE to fit your preferences

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a software developer or a software or DevOps engineer.
  • You work with multiple languages and technologies.
  • You want to leverage GitHub Copilot in your daily work.

Prerequisites

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

The time frames are only estimates and may vary according to how the class is progressing.

Introduction to AI, LLMs, and prompt engineering (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Your familiarity with AI and GitHub Copilots; artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) defined; the art of speaking to LLMs—prompt engineering best practices

Introduction to GitHub Copilot (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Feature set; key components and data flow; quick demo in VSCode
  • Q&A
  • Break

Ideate and scaffold your code (55 minutes)

  • Presentation: Exercise overview; repository template overview
  • Hands-on exercise: Use Copilot chat to research your idea for a new project; use code completion and chat to scaffold the project from scratch in VSCode
  • Break

Write, test, and document your code (50 minutes)

  • Hands-on exercises: Use Copilot code completion and chat to implement new features and write unit tests; use chat to understand any failing unit tests and implement the fix(es); use code completion and chat to document your code
  • Break

Review, refactor, and deploy your code (50 minutes)

  • Hands-on exercises: Use Copilot code completion and chat to optimize and refactor your code and write automation workflows for code maintenance and quality checks; use Copilot CLI to generate terminal commands for deploying your code to GitHub

Potential pitfalls (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: GitHub Copilot data privacy and security; potential pitfalls; troubleshooting errors
  • Q&A

Your Instructor

  • Steffen Bjerkenas

    Steffen Bjerkenås is a solutions architect on the professional services team at GitHub, where he works across industries to help customers improve their software development processes.