Back in February, I presented a live demonstration on GitHub Actions for the NCI Bioinformatics Training and Education Program Coding Club.
Data scientists, analysts, and software engineers alike can all benefit from learning how to use continuous integration & deployment tools like GitHub Actions, even if you’re not deploying software. I use GitHub Actions almost daily to automate repetitive tasks like formatting code, running tests, and publishing reports and documentation. It can seem like an intimidating skill to learn, but it doesn’t have to be. In my demo, I start with the “Hello world!” of GitHub Actions workflows, gradually introduce building blocks for creating useful actions, and show examples of more complex workflows for CI/CD tasks.
You can watch the recorded video from my demo and follow along with the stand-alone instructor notes, or just read the notes at your own pace. At the end, there’s a list of resources for learning more about GitHub Actions and many useful Actions that you can reuse to automate just about any task you can think of.
