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Hands-on GitHub Copilot

Published by O'Reilly Media, Inc.

Intermediate content levelIntermediate

Practical tips and best practices

Course outcomes

  • Learn how Copilot works, what it can be used for, and its advantages and disadvantages
  • Experience Copilot hands-on across a variety of languages and frameworks
  • Explore how to leverage Copilot for a wide range of tasks

Course description

GitHub Copilot is a generative AI implementation based on the popular ChatGPT model and developed in collaboration with OpenAI. It helps developers create, debug, optimize, translate, and explain code in commonly used programming languages and commonly used frameworks as well as other functional processes such as SQL.

Join expert Brent Laster to get hands-on with Copilot. You’ll get tips and tricks, best practices, and strategies; explore Copilot Chat, Copilot X, and Copilot Labs; and learn how to form the best prompts and queries to get the most out of Copilot.

What you’ll learn and how you can apply it

  • Use Copilot for code completion, test generation, natural language queries, K8s manifests generation, regular expression generation, code translation, automatic documentation generation, automatic fixing of code, explaining of code, simplification of code, and more

This live event is for you because...

  • You’re a developer, tester, software engineer, or DevOps engineer who wants to understand what GitHub Copilot and generative AI are and how they can help you in your daily routine.
  • You’re an AI user who wants to understand how GitHub Copilot differs from solutions like ChatGPT.
  • You’re a business/team/thought leader who wants to evaluate Copilot’s suitability for your projects/clients.

Prerequisites

  • Basic experience coding in one or more languages
  • A free GitHub account and a browser
  • IMPORTANT NOTE: In order to do the labs for this course, you must have a GitHub Copilot subscription. If you do not, you can log into GitHub, then go to https://github.com/settings/copilot and sign up (start free trial) before the course.

Recommended follow-up:

Schedule

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

Introduction to GitHub Copilot (35 minutes)

  • Presentation: Basics of GitHub Copilot; generative AI; benefits for code generation and completion; prompt creation and engineering
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore generating code based on prompts
  • Q&A

Navigating and using Copilot Chat (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Understanding Copilot's suggestions and interface; additional Chat features; simplifying and fixing code; working with code suggestions, completions, and examples
  • Hands-on exercise: Use Copilot to simplify and explain code
  • Q&A
  • Break

Leveraging Copilot after the coding (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Working with Chat more directly; having Copilot explain and document code; asking questions in code
  • Hands-on exercise: Use Copilot after the coding is done
  • Group discussion: What might be the best use of Copilot for your work?
  • Q&A

Test generation (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Generating tests through comment directives; generating more elaborate tests through Chat; detailing the type of tests you want
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore Copilot test generation
  • Group discussion: What are some test cases you could automate with Copilot?
  • Q&A
  • Break

SQL and refining context (30 minutes)

  • Presentation: Generating SQL queries, tables, indices, and stored procedures; optimizing and simplifying queries; enhancing the context
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore Copilot to help with SQL
  • Q&A

Updates and deprecations (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Understanding Copilot’s frame of reference; why Copilot returns incorrect or out-of-date results and how to fix
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore updates and deprecated code
  • Group discussion: What are some deprecation issues that have tripped you up?
  • Q&A
  • Break

Specs, APIs, and code translation (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Generating Kubernetes manifests; an example of the “2021 problem”; discovering APIs; generating code to use APIs; translating code from one language to another
  • Hands-on exercise: Explore frameworks and APIs
  • Q&A

Using Chat Participants in Copilot (25 minutes)

  • Presentation: Leveraging chat features to simplify your workflow
  • Hands-on exercise: Working with the built-in chat participants in Copilot and their commands
  • Q&A

Copilot in GitHub (15 minutes)

  • Presentation: Learning how to utilize the integrated features of Copilot in GitHub
  • Hands-on exercise: Using the integrated chat interface in GitHub.

Your Instructor

  • Brent Laster

    Brent Laster is an experienced technology leader and a global trainer, speaker and author. He’s also the founder and president of Tech Skills Transformations, LLC, a company dedicated to making technology understandable and usable. Throughout his career in software development and management, Brent has always made time to learn and develop both technical and leadership skills and share them with others. He believes that regardless of the topic or technology, there’s no substitute for the excitement and sense of potential that come from providing others with the knowledge they need to accomplish their goals.

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Skill covered

GitHub Copilot