Week 1 overview

This week you set up the toolkit every engineer uses and write your first useful Python. As a forward deployed engineer you'll spend your days in a terminal, writing code and sharing it through GitHub, so getting comfortable with these three things now pays off every week after.

By Sunday you'll have a Python script that turns a list of business expenses into a clear report, saved on GitHub where your instructor can see it.

Learning objectives

By the end of this week you should be able to:

1. Move around your computer and run programs from the terminal.
2. Write Python using variables, numbers, strings, lists and dictionaries.
3. Make decisions with if and repeat work with for loops.
4. Track your work with Git: check status, stage and commit changes.
5. Publish your code to GitHub and keep it up to date with git push.

Pre-work

Do this before the live session. Budget about 1 hour.

Resource	What to focus on	Time
Setup guide	Finish every step and pass the final check. You can't follow the live session without it.	45–60 min (if not done yet)
Why Python	Read the whole page and run the exercise at the end.	20 min
The terminal	Work through every command on the page in your own terminal.	30 min
The Python Tutorial: An informal introduction (opens in a new tab)	Read section 3.1 on numbers and strings. Type the examples into python3 as you go.	20 min

This week at a glance

When	Lesson	Type
Before the live session	This overview and the pre-work above	Concept
Live session 1	Python basics	Live session
Live session 2	Git, GitHub and your first script	Guided build
Independent work	Assignment: a café expense report	Independent assignment
End of the week	Week 1 checkpoint	Checkpoint

The two live sessions make up your 4 live hours. The assignment is your 4 hours of independent work. Each lesson ends with a short daily task: do it the same day, while the material is fresh.