It’s that time of year where I start to catch up on everything on my To Do list for learning.

One that was definitely at the top was GitHub Copilot and this was a facesmacking one as the amount of time that could have been saved using this early on in some of our projects would have been insurmountable.

Getting Started

To get started all you need is VSCode along with the GitHub Copilot and Copilot Chat extensions and then using the copilot chat you can begin creating the infrastructure for your project.

This gave me a pretty decent looking website to start off with and I didn’t have to go through all the downloading of files and creating folders.

I then decided to get a bit more lazier and asked Copilot to create a separate Weather page and link that page to my navbar which it had already created. What I like about this functionality is that it allowed me to preview the changes it was going to make before it applied them (i.e., going back and fixing up some mistakes).

Connecting Third-Party APIs

I initially wanted to do something a bit more involved, but ran into issues into setting up profiles and subscriptions the first time around so I scaled back my ambitions a bit.

The following use case still shows what Copilot was able to do (before I got involved and messed it all up). At this point I had created a new page called “location.html”.

Even after this simplistic ask, Copilot still follows up with me for what I will have to do on my own.

And once I setup an API key, I got this beautifully rendered page showing Ottawa, Ontario on a google embedded map in my AMAZING website.

What’s Next?

I probably spent about 30 minutes stumbling through the above, and 10 of those minutes were spent sorting out API keys – that’s pretty impressive.

For someone who is not a UI person, Copilot can save you a ton of time while giving you a quality standpoint. On the data side, I want to play around more with all these keywords that I invariably skipped over a bit too quickly. My mind is also whirring with how I can leverage copilot in some more complex tasks focused on more precise applications of business logic.

But out of the box, wow, very impressed.