(Pre-)Commit to Better Code

  • 07-08, 13:45–15:15, Club E
  • 07-08, 15:30–17:00, Club E

All times in Europe/Prague

Maintaining code quality can be challenging, no matter the size of your project or number of contributors. Different team members may have different opinions on code styling and preferences for code structure, while solo contributors might find themselves spending a considerable amount of time making sure the code conforms to accepted conventions. However, manually inspecting and fixing issues in files is both tedious and error-prone. As such, computers are much more suited to this task than humans. Pre-commit hooks are a great way to have a computer handle this for you.

Pre-commit hooks are code checks that run whenever you attempt to commit your changes with Git. They can detect and, in some cases, automatically correct code-quality issues before they make it to your code base. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure pre-commit hooks for your repository to ensure that only code that passes your checks makes it into your code base. We will also explore how to build custom pre-commit hooks for novel use cases.

Prerequisites

  • Comfort writing Python code and working with Git on the command line using basic commands (e.g., clone, status, diff, add, commit, and push)
  • Have Python and Git installed on your computers, as well as a text editor for writing code (e.g., Visual Studio Code)

Prepare for the workshop

  1. Fork and clone this repository.
  2. Create a virtual environment for this workshop using whichever tool you prefer.
  3. Run pip install pre-commit (or equivalent) in your activated virtual environment.
  4. Brainstorm some ideas for your hook.

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Expected audience expertise

Intermediate

See also: Slides

Stefanie Molin is a software engineer at Bloomberg in New York City, where she tackles tough problems in information security, particularly those revolving around data wrangling/visualization, building tools for gathering data, and knowledge sharing. She is also the author of “Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas: A Python data science handbook for data collection, wrangling, analysis, and visualization,” which is currently in its second edition and has been translated into Korean and Chinese, and a core developer of numpydoc. She holds a bachelor’s of science degree in operations research from Columbia University's Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science, as well as a master’s degree in computer science, with a specialization in machine learning, from Georgia Tech. In her free time, she enjoys traveling the world, inventing new recipes, and learning new languages spoken among both people and computers.