It was 3 PM on a Friday. A doctor at an NHS hospital in the UK tries to check his email. Instead, one of the PCs in the room reboots into a scary red screen demanding $300 in Bitcoin [23].

Many devs adopt the git add . (yolo, just yeet it all into the commit) workflow. It is fast, simple, and usually correct. But eventually you’ll have files in your repo directory that should never be committed: secrets, generated artifacts, dependency folders, and random local junk. That’s what .gitignore is for.

Functions allow you to reuse and organize code. Instead of copying and pasting the same logic everywhere, you define it once and call it whenever you need it. They’re the most important tool for writing DRY code.

A new year and another record broken! In January a combined 4,016,641 lessons and challenges were completed by you, dear pupils! And to top it off, we’re now releasing the much anticipated Power BI Course by none other than Alex the Analyst! I hope you enjoy it.