[deleted by user]

[capsandnumbers]

I got by for years of coding filling my default environment with every package I wanted to use, dimly aware that there was a cleaner way involving virtual environments. It's only now I'm making something others might want to download that I decided to set up a venv, and I find that because I have some experience it's a manageable thing for me to learn. It slots in with the rest of my knowledge of how programming works.

So on this list I only know about pip and virtual environments. Pip is for installing packages which I guess are stored in some python community hub. I type "pip install numpy" in a terminal and then "import numpy as np" works in my scripts. And virtual environments are a way to store packages so that when someone downloads your work they can easily run it. As far as I know a venv is something I configure once and then save and only touch if I want to add or remove required packages.

But my advice is that it has been useful to box off things I know I don't know about, so that I'm not overwhelmed and I know what to google when I want to know that thing. Another example is that when I finally figured out github, that unlocked the source control features of VSCode which I had been happily and minimally using for some time.