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How to Learn More repl.it
00:00 Okay, so maybe you got excited about using this online coding environment called Repl.it. Now here’s a question, “How to learn more about it?” And I don’t have a specific course that I can recommend you but what you can do, since this whole thing lives from its online community, I would suggest you to just get involved in the online community.
00:19 There is a Quick Start Guide on the Repl.it site that you can go through, which walks you through using Repl.it for Python 3. It looks like a lot of reading—it’s a bit like the docs—but it’s actually a nice getting started guide that you can work through.
00:32 And then I would suggest you check out the community. There’s lots of interesting tutorials in there. There’s conversations, comments that you can collaborate with other people on. Check out what they have built and just try taking it apart like that. Of course, one of the most important ways of learning is also just to go make an account—or don’t make an account and stay anonymous.
00:52 Just hit new repl and start exploring.
00:59 All right, so that’s what I would suggest you to do. Keep in mind that this is a pretty cool way of sharing code with other people. Know when you want to use it and when you want to work with a local coding environment, because obviously there’s some problems with working with something online.
01:14 For example, if I go and disconnect my WiFi—ha, that’s it, right? I can’t work on this unless I’m connected to the internet. It has its use cases, and sometimes it’s also just not the best way to go.
01:27 But make sure that you know these kind of things exist and when you’re going to want to use it.
01:32 That sums up the section about online coding environments. I hope it was useful for you, and see you in the next section.
Martin Breuss RP Team on Feb. 21, 2020
Good questions @qmark42!
Security
Since your code is stored on someone else’s computers (in this case repl.it’s servers), you are essentially subject to whatever security they are implementing.
The question here is also what type of security are you talking about. Your local computer is save, since everything happens somewhere on a remote server. The worst that can happen here is that someone hacks your repl.it account and, idk, posts an offensive code snippet in your name 😜
By default, your code is public. You can send the URL to anyone else and they can see and even run it. So security in terms of intellectual property is not given. Some online coding environment certainly also have options for private code. Then, however, the security of your code again depends on whatever measures the company implements on their servers.
I wouldn’t suggest writing any larger codebase on a remote dev environment in any case, it is mostly meant for quick platform-independent iteration and for sharing code with others.
So I think the main security issue here is for repl.it to make sure that none of the code that people write on their servers actually breaks something on their machines, and I’m sure they are taking good measures regarding that :)
Debugging
Debugging with print() is very common and I personally do it all the time as well. Especially for very simple pieces of code it is fast and easy to understand.
Debuggers come in handy when the codebase and complexity of your program grows, and it’s certainly worth it to get familiar with the concept early on.
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qmark42 on Feb. 20, 2020
2 points come to mind at the moment. In an on line editor, what kind of security can a person expect for his programs, and do you use the debugging tools very often? I have read that some programmers prefer to just put in a print statement to see how far the program will run, and then go through the code at that point. Thanks for the course, and I’ll finish soon.