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Taking an online course can be overwhelming. How do you learn at your own pace and successfully achieve your goals? Here are some general tips that can help you stay focused and on track. Set daily goals for studying Ask yourself what you hope to accomplish in your course each day. Setting a clear goal can help you stay motivated and beat procrastination. The goal should be specific and easy to measure, such as "I’ll watch all the videos in Module 2 and complete the first programming assignment". And don’t forget to reward yourself when you make progress towards your goal! Create a dedicated study space It’s easier to recall information if you’re in the same place where you first learned it, so having a dedicated space at home to take online courses can make your learning more effective. Remove any distractions from the space and if possible, make it separate from your bed or sofa. A clear distinction between where you study and where you take breaks can help you focus.  Schedule time to study on your calendar Open your calendar and choose a predictable, reliable time that you can dedicate to watching lectures and completing assignments. This helps ensure that your courses won’t become the last thing on your to-do list. Tip: You can add deadlines for a Coursera course to your Google calendar, Apple calendar, or another calendar app. Keep yourself accountable Tell your friends about the courses you’re taking, post achievements to your social media accounts or blog about your homework assignments. Having a community and support network of friends and family to cheer you on makes a difference! Actively take notes Taking notes can promote active thinking, boost comprehension and extend your attention span. It’s a good strategy to internalize knowledge whether you’re learning online or in the classroom. So, grab a notebook or find a digital app that works best for you and start synthesizing key points. Tip: While watching a lecture on Coursera, you can click the 'Save Note' button below the video to save a screenshot to your course notes and add your own comments. Join the discussion Course discussion forums are a great place to ask questions about assignments, discuss topics, share resources and make friends. Our research shows that learners who participate in the discussion forums are 37% more likely to complete a course. So make a post today! Do one thing at a time Multitasking is less productive than focusing on a single task at a time. Researchers from Stanford University found that “People who are regularly bombarded with several streams of electronic information cannot pay attention, recall information or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time.” Stay focused on one thing at a time. You’ll absorb more information and complete assignments with greater productivity and ease than if you were trying to do many things at once.  Take breaks Resting your brain after learning is critical to high performance. If you find yourself working on a challenging problem without much progress for an hour, take a break. Walking outside, taking a shower or talking with a friend can help you to re-energize and even give you new ideas on how to tackle the project. Your learning journey starts now!  While preparing for the module quiz or working on achieving your learning goals you're encouraged to:   Work through each lesson in the learning pathway. Try not to skip any activities or lessons unless you are certain that you already know this information well enough to move ahead.    Take the opportunity to go back and watch a video or read all the information provided before moving on to the next lesson or module.  Complete all the knowledge and module quizzes and exercises. Read the feedback carefully when answering quizzes, as this will help you to reinforce what you are learning.  Make use of the practical learning environment provided by the exercises. You can gain substantial reinforcement of your learning through the step-by-step application of your skills.

Version Control plays a crucial part in software development. As a developer, you’ll work with other developers on projects to deliver software to customers. Depending on the role, you could be working with a small team of 2 or 3 developers in a single project or a large team spanning multiple projects. In either scenario, Version Control will be a crucial tool to help your team succeed. However, Version Control must be complemented by other tools and procedures to ensure quality and efficiency throughout the software development process. In this lesson, we’ll explore some of the common tools and strategies developers use in conjunction with Version Control. Workflow Using Version Control without a proper workflow is like building a city without traffic lights; without appropriate management, everything will turn into chaos. For example, let’s say you’re working on a big project and editing a file. Another developer also starts editing a file. Both of you submit the file to the VCS at the same time. Now there’s a conflict! How should the conflict be resolved? A good workflow will have a process for resolving conflicts. Another example is when a new junior developer is joining your team. If the project code is used for a critical system, it is risky to allow them to submit code changes directly. To solve this, many developers use a peer review system where another developer must review code before it can be merged in. Workflows are essential to ensure code is managed correctly and reduce mistakes from happening. Different projects will have different workflows. In this course, you’ll learn some common workflows using the Git Version Control System. Continuous Integration Continuous Integration, or CI, is used to automate the integration of code changes from multiple developers into a single mainstream. Using a workflow whereby small changes are merged frequently, often many times per day, will reduce the number of merge conflicts. This process is widespread in test-driven software development strategies. CI is often used to automatically compile the project and run tests on every code change to ensure that the build remains stable and prevent regressions in functionality. Continuous Delivery Continuous Delivery is an extension of Continuous Integration. Once the changes have been merged into the main stream, a Continuous Delivery system automatically packages the application and prepares it for deployment. This helps avoid human error when packaging the application. Continuous Deployment Continuous Deployment is an extension of Continuous Delivery. The goal of Continuous Deployment is to deploy and release software to customers frequently and safely. The strategy commonly involves automatically deploying to a test (also known as staging) environment first to validate the deployment package and software changes. Once validated, it can automatically deploy to the live (also known as production) environment for customers. Conclusion With these tools and procedures, it is possible to understand how software starts from a developer writing code to being deployed live for customers to use. Of course, there is much more to running a live software service, but that is a lesson for another day.

Development Environments Every development team prior to releasing their new features or changes needs to verify that the code they do release is not going to cause any issues or bugs. In order to achieve this, they normally set up multiple environments for different ways to test and verify. A common practice is for teams to have a developer environment, a UAT or QA environment, and a staging environment. The main purpose of this flow is to find any potential issues that may arise due to changes or new features being added to the codebase. The more ways to test the changes the less likely bugs will be introduced. Staging The staging environment should mimic your production environment. The reason for this is because you want to test the code in an environment that matches what you have in production. This allows teams to spot or find any potential issues prior to them getting to production. The closer the staging environment is to your production, the more accurate your testing is going to be. Staging environments can also be used for testing and verifying new features and allow other teams including QA or stakeholders to see and use those features as a pre-trial. Staging should also cover all areas of the architecture of the application including the database and any other services that may be required. Areas that benefit from staging environments include: New Features Developers submitting new features along with feature flags for turning them on and off should always do a testing round in a staging environment. They allow teams to verify that the feature works, it can be turned on and off via configuration flags and also that it does not break or interfere with existing functionality. Testing As the staging environment mimics your production environment, it's also a great place to run tests. QA teams will normally use it to verify new features, configuration changes or software updates/patching. The types of testing covered will be Unit testing, Integration testing and performance testing. All except performance testing can also be carried out in production. Performance can also be completed in production but only at specific times - usually out of hours as it will have a drastic effect on the user experience. Sometimes it is not always feasible to have an exact replication either due to costs or time. Certain areas can be cut back - for example, if your service is load balanced on 10 virtual machines in production, you could still have 4 virtual machines in staging. The underlying architecture is the same but the overall performance may be different. Migrations Staging is a perfect place to test and verify data migrations. Snapshots can be taken from production and used to test your migration scripts to confirm your changes will not break anything. If in the case it does cause an issue, you simply rollback and try again. Doing something like a migration in production is extremely risky and error-prone. Configuration Changes Configuration can also cause headaches for teams, especially in a large cloud-based architecture. Having a staging environment will allow you to spot any potential issues or bottlenecks. Production Production is live. It's out there for people to see and/or interact with. Any issues or problems you may have had should have been caught and fixed in the staging environment. The staging area gives the team a safety net to catch these possible issues. Any code that is deployed to production should have been tested and verified before the deployment itself. Downtime Downtime for any service especially customer facing will most likely be revenue impacting. If customers can not access or use your website or app to its full capabilities, it will most likely have a cost involved. Take for example an e-commerce company that allows users to buy goods and services online. If they release a new feature to their shopping cart which actually breaks the payment process, this will have an impact on customers not being able to buy goods online. Vulnerabilities Cyber-security should also play a big role in what gets released in production. Any updates to software such as patching or moving to the latest version should be checked and verified. This is also the same rule for not upgrading software when critical updates are released. Reputation Downtime or issues in production is damaging for a company as it does not instill confidence in end users. If something is down or broken it can cause the company to lose potential customers.

Duration: 15 minutes Total points: 5 Read Edcent Honor Code Click Complete to take the quiz.

Discuss the challenges you encountered when making and changing directories and files It can be helpful to share any challenges you are facing with others on the course, and you may find you can assist others with the challenges they are facing. What have you found difficult when creating and manipulating files and directories? Is there anything you would like to learn more about the directory and file manipulation? What do you feel confident about when creating files and directories? Share your thoughts with your classmates and explore how you can help each other get to the next level! *Participation is optional

Duration: 15 minutes Total points: 5 Read Edcent Honor Code Click Complete to take the quiz.

Git works on all operating system platforms such as Windows, Mac, and Linux. On Mac or Linux, in some cases, it is installed by default. The majority of users will use Git via the command line as its syntax is very easy to understand and follow. Git also works well in development environments and integrates into IDEs and other GUI offerings. Go to https://gitforwindows.org/ and download the latest version. Once the download is complete, open the installation file and follow the instructions for installing. After installation, open the Git Bash application. You can also use the windows command line. To see what version of git was installed type git version and press the Enter key. You should see something similar to the following output.