Ultimate Guide to GitHub’s Student Developer Pack in 2019
“Every great developer you know got there by solving problems they were unqualified to solve until they actually did it.” — Patrick McKenzie
This article is aimed at absolute beginners who want get into the field of software development. Experienced developers who want to check out the Student Developer Pack will also find this useful. The GitHub Student Developer Pack is one of the best resources that will get students start out as developers — Not only do you get free access to all of GitHub’s pro features, such as private repositories, you’ll also get access to over 20 different developer tools and courses to keep you busy.
Here I’m trying to make a logical step-by-step guide to use the resources so that you can make the most out of the pack.
How to avail the pack?
You can view the Student Developer Pack and all the things that come with it by going here.
First of all you need to have a GitHub account in order to avail the Student Developer Pack. Clicking on “Get your Pack” will prompt you to sign up with your GitHub account so that it can authorize your profile with the request for the pack, and confirm that you are a student and are older than 13 years.
After signing up, you will have submit some basic information:-
- Name
- Institutional email ID( An IEEE email address would suffice if you don’t have an institutional one)
- Name of your institution
- To confirm that we are actually a student, we are asked to upload a validation — a school ID or a letter. It should show our current status as a student.
After entering all the necessary information, you can hit the “submit request” button and wait for your confirmation email.
Whats in the pack?!
Okay so you’ve applied for the pack and finally got the mail confirming that you’ve successfully availed the Student Developer Pack. Awesome!
Now let’s look at what all you get in the pack, in a logical order, which will be easy for a beginner developer to follow.
For this I have classified the different resources as Phase 1 and Phase 2. Phase 1 is for the bare beginner, people with little or no coding experience. If you’re comfortable with using all the tools in Phase 1, you can start dipping your toes into the tools and platforms in Phase 2.
( All the entries in Phase 1 are listed in the order in which a beginner can start learning them )
Phase 1
Atom, the hackable text editor.
To be a good developer, you need a good text editor to start with. Atom is the best place to start as a beginner — a hackable text editor open sourced by GitHub itself!
Web Development Crash Course from Thinkful
Once you’ve got your text editor up and running, jump right into web development with some quality content to get yourself started with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The course covers a wide range of topics including most of frontend web development, along with other tools like git and APIs
Web Development Bootcamp from Flatiron School
Once you’ve mastered basic HTML, CSS and JavaScript, go onto becoming a complete Full Stack developer, with this bootcamp which covers Ruby, Rails, SQL, and advanced JavaScript including frameworks such as React.
Unlimited private repos in GitHub
So by now you might’ve started writing some good code and would want to keep track of your projects. Github offers you free unlimited private repositories as long as you are student! (Normally $7/month)
GitHub Desktop
GitHub Desktop is a desktop application which makes it easier to commit and push files! You can learn to use to easily manage workflow.
Pro membership for a year in GitKraken
Trust me when I say this, collaboration becomes a whole lot easier when there is a GUI application to track contributions. GitKraken is an awesome tool to have while you are working as a team, to track commits, TODOs and whatnot!
Pro membership in GitKraken Glo for a year
GitKraken Glo is a kanban board style activity tracker for devs. Its really useful while working as a team to track the progress of different tasks.
Free domain and SSL certificate from namecheap
You get a one year free domain name registration on the .me TLD. Go set up your developer portfolio with all the web development you’ve learnt ;) You also get a one year SSL certificate.
Platform credits in Hackhands
One thing we will all come across while learning are doubts. What could be more helpful than having 24/7 support from real developers! Get $25 in platform credits from Hackhands
Free subscription to JetBrains IDEs
I personally love the IntelliJ platform. I use Android Studio, IDEA and PyCharm in my day to day coding usually. With the Student Developer Pack, you acn get a free subscription as long as you are a student.
Sentry
Sentry is an open-source, real time error tracking system that helps you monitor and fix crashes and improve overall efficiency.
Game development tools from Unreal
Get the complete game development tools from Unreal, as long as you’re a student, for all the platforms — PC, console, mobile, web, VR, you name it!
That’s all with Phase 1 — If you’re familiar with all the above mentioned resources, you can call yourself a competent developer. But you shouldn’t stop here. There are a plethora of resources with which you can improve your skill set and become a better engineer.
Phase 2
Here are the rest of the tools, which can be used once you have some basic experience in coding and general software development.
Platform credits for Amazon Web Services
AWS is amazon’s platform for providing cloud services. You get free credits to use in the platform with your student pack.
Platform credits for DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a cloud hosting service with lots of useful features and plans. The Student Developer Pack gives you $50 worth of credit to be used in the platform.
Algolia
You get 1 million operations, for a year in Algolia. You get full access to search APIs, which gives a unique search and discovery experience for your users, in all platforms.
Bitnami
You get a Business 3 plan for a year. Bitnami is a library of software packages to be used with web applications and other development stacks.
Carto
Carto is a SaaS cloud platform which provides location and web mapping tools. APIs and other developer tools are available for cartography and web visualization.
CrowdFlower
CrowdFlower, now Figure Eight, is a data enrichment platform for data science.
Datadog
Datadog is a monitoring service for cloud based applications, providing monitoring of servers, databases and so on. You get a pro account for 2 years with the Developer Student Pack.
Heroku
Heroku is a popular platform to run and deploy your applications. The platform support Ruby on Rails, Java, Node.js, Python, Scala, PHP and Go.
SendGrid
SendGrid is a communication platform for transactional and marketing emails. With the Student Developer Pack, you get a free Student plan, as long as you are a student.
Stripe
Stripe provides individuals and businesses a platform to receive payments over the internet.
Talplytics
It is a mobile A/B testing platform for native mobile apps. With the Student Developer Pack, you get unlimited access to all the tools for 6 months.
transifex
Transifex is a cloud based, continuously localized translation management system, which integrates with all your other development platforms. You get one year of the starter plan for free.
Travis CI
Travis CI is a continuous integration service used to build and test software projects hosted on GitHub. Open source builds maybe tested freely. With the student pack, you can test private builds too.
Phew! Now that was a lot, wasn’t it! That is how much of free stuff that you get from the GitHub’s Student Developer Pack!
If you ever feel intimidated by all these, just take a deep breath and start slow and simple — one step at a time.
“Whether we’re fighting climate change or going to space, everything is moved forward by computers, and we don’t have enough people who can code. Teaching young people to code early on can help build skills and confidence and energize the classroom with learning-by-doing opportunities.”
— Richard Branson, Founder, Virgin Group
I believe that you’ll find this guide useful and that it will be something which you can refer to often, even if you’re just a beginner, or a seasoned developer!
