Welcome to Modern Software Development Practices

About the Author

Hello. I’m Matias Callara and for more than 10 years I’ve been working at the intersection between Machine Learning, Operational Research and Decision Theory. This will not be a surprise to you if you consider my academic career. I’m an Industrial Engineer with a Master in Optimization and a Ph.D. in Informatics (where I worked applying Machine Learning for behavior prediction in the Cloud Computing Software Company).

How this course was born

My role as a tech lead and portfolio manager, responsible for several products, drove me to find and share tools that could help our team work smarter and more effectively. I focused on making sure these tools were easy for everyone to use and encouraged teams to adopt them.

This course is designed to benefit those with academic backgrounds unrelated to software development. We will explore key topics, from code management with Git to testing and debugging strategies, to equip students with tools and techniques that will hopefully make them enjoy their work alone or as part of a software development team.

Are software development practices still relevant?

Is Software Development still relevants in times of Gen AI? Programming as an Art: even though AI could program for you, you may still want to do it yourself because you enjoy it. Programming and thought process: programming is an activity that allws me to build complex solutions.

What do you expect from the course?

Before starting this journey, it is useful to have a somehow clear vision of where we want to get. I think this is a good moment to ask you to write down your expectations. What do you expect from this course? What do you want to learn? What do you want to be able to do after completing the course?

• 1 Introduction to Version Control
  • 1.1 Git and the Command Line
  • 1.2 Local repositories and commit
  • 1.3 Branches
  • 1.4 Merging Branches
  • Setting up your GitLab account
  • 1.5 Remote Repositories
• 2 AI-Assisted Software Development and Debugging
  • 2.1 AI-Assisted Software Development
  • 2.1 Debugging in Python with Visual Studio Code
• 3 Testing and Test Driven Development (TDD)
  • 3.1 Testing
  • 3.2 Test Driven Development (TDD)
• References
• 4 Python Packages, Virtual Environments and Dependency Management
  • 4.1 Managing Python Versions
  • References
  • 4.2 Python Project Management with Poetry
  • References
  • 4.3 Dependency Management and Virtual Environments
  • Poetry Virtual Environments with Visual Studio Code
• 5 Software Development Life Cycle, Versioning and Packaging.
  • 5.1 CI/CD pipelines with Gitlab
  • References
  • 5.2 Software Versioning
  • 5.3 Packaging