GitHub Student Developer Pack

[djb_hackernews]

This really makes something I've been thinking about very clear.

I often think about the "everyone can code" movement. It's not something I particularly believe in, but exposing as many people as possible is a great thing.

However, the bit I get stuck on is programming is more than just typing characters in the correct sequence. It's deploying, testing, environment issues, metrics, databases, dns, etc. Basically it is a lot more complex than "learn to code".

This smorgasbord of services really drives that point home and I can't imagine how overwhelmed I'd be if I saw this back when I was a student.

EDIT: I'd like to make clear that I think this is absolutely awesome and no student or person otherwise should be intimidated or overwhelmed, let your curiosity wander!

[exDM69]

> It's deploying, testing, environment issues, metrics, databases, dns, etc. Basically it is a lot more complex than "learn to code".

You're mixing the "everybody can code" idea with "everyone should become a professional software engineer". The former is a great idea, the latter not so much.

"Everybody can code" is about basic computer literacy. Too many people do boring and repetitive jobs on their computers. Basic understanding of programming should help people write that Excel macro that saves them a few hours of manual labor. Or make more informed decisions when being a customer purchasing software engineering services. To understand what a computer program or programmer can and, especially, can not do.

If I'm asked "should I learn to code", the answer usually is "if your job includes repetitive tasks using a computer, the answer is yes".

[jonahx]

> It's deploying, testing, environment issues, metrics, databases, dns, etc. Basically it is a lot more complex than "learn to code".

I would even go further and say that such things are well over 50% of a working programmer's time. Learning the toolset for modern programming is as hard or harder than learning how to program well. It's a different kind of hard, though -- the ability to slog through tedium and frustration.

[Igglyboo]

That's just it, it's learning to code, not be a full fledged software engineer. If you go take a free cooking classes at the local community college you might be able to make some tasty food but you won't be prepared to run an entire kitchen.

[joshvm]

It's also, frankly, expensive before you know which things you really need when starting out. You're easily looking at $100+ a month for even a basic set of saas tools. Most of these programs have limited accounts, but they're often only for public use. There's very little help when you're in the gulf between getting your first users and actually making money from them.

[iwannayoyo]

I would like to defend the "everybody can code" movement a bit. First of all, I'm sure we both support the idea of giving everyone the opportunity to learn coding. Along with that, however, I want to point out that the movement is not intended to make everyone a programmer. Not every child will become a programmer, and I think everyone recognizes that. The point of the movement is that a basic understanding of programming is becoming necessary for many jobs, and that even a basic idea of how to code can get one person a job over another person with no experience. The movement is about raising the baseline coding knowledge above 0, not about making everyone into a programmer.

[naiyt]

So if you have an existing DigitalOcean account, it makes it seem like you can't apply the promo code to it. But I shot off a ticket to DigitalOcean's support, and they applied the $100 promo to my account within 5 minutes. So definitely send them a message if you have an existing account that you would like to have the credit applied to.

Awesome pack, and great service from DigitalOcean as well.

Also of interest is that my account is apparently already flagged as a "student account" since I've gotten the 5 free private repos in the past with it. Which means once I hit "Get your pack" it immediately gave me access.

[sondh]

I have just redeemed the code in my DO account and it worked on the first attempt. I think they have fixed the issue. To any students out there: try first before reaching out to support, they are busy men/women.

[neom]

This should be no problem at all. If you have already applied a promo just let support know and they will be able to get folks figured out and moving forward.

Happy coding!! <3

[russum]

Hm, that's nice of them, although this page states you aren't allowed to do that: "Keep in mind that we only allow one promo code per account, so if you’ve redeemed one in the past you may not add another. To see your promo code history please visit your billing page."

https://www.digitalocean.com/help/pricing-and-billing/

[johndbritton]

Yeah, you'll have to contact DigitalOcean support to redeem the code if you already used one on your account.

[Veratyr]

The message underneath the code on Github's page tells you to do just that. I did the same thing. DO's support has definitely improved since I last used it.

[abhia]

You could get it! cloud.digitalocean.com/user_payment_profiles and put it in at the bottom!

[chk]

Took them no time at all to add it to my existing account, thanks for the tip!

[wmt]

While the value here is nice, I maybe would not suggest investing too much of your time on learning proprietary temporarily free developer tools. There are great open source tools for many developer tasks that are not just good options, but can even be industry standards.

[crazypyro]

My 2 year discount on Micro just expired. I'm still in school for another year, so I'm curious if there are any limitations to people that previously received free Micro as a student for 2 years, but had that initial 2 years run out. Is this new offer free Micro for the entirety of academic career or the same 2 year offer from before?

Either way, I hope I can get all the other awesome stuff (especially the CrowdFlower access). This + the 150 day free Azure trial I just got from a hackathon this past weekend would make for some enjoyable weekends.

[crazysim]

The BitBucket student discount and offer is much greater than the Micro discount (unlimited private repositories and collaborators). It would be a better idea to use BitBucket for private stuff instead and keep the public facing stuff in GitHub. Best of both worlds.

[Vaskivo]

Yeah, I was thinking about the time restrictions. A degree is 5 years in my country. I can see this being useful to students in the 3rd or 4th year, so one year is not enough. And being a student, I doubt they would start paying for those things. They need their money for books, food and partying :)

[abhia]

Hey - you can apply again, and they'll approve it again. I had the same problem (I'm not sure if this is okay though)

[robbles]

I renewed mine a few weeks ago after the 2 years expired. As long as you're still a student, just apply for renewal and they'll give it to you.

I also got the student pack right away, probably because of my student status.

[johndbritton]

You can reapply and you will get all the other stuff.

[jsherwani]

We (Screenhero) were honored to be invited to be a part of the program by GitHub :) We've wanted a way to make Screenhero affordable to students, and this helps us do exactly that. Thanks, GitHub!

[findjashua]

I really appreciate Github doing this, so kudos to them.

While I'm no longer a student myself, I don't think cost is the main prohibitive factor for students. The fundamental tools I use for my side projects - Atom, Bitbucket and Heroku - are available for free. The other services are nice to have, but seem to be much more niche.

I think the prohibitive factor is the perception that coding is hard and complex for regular folks, and is only easy for the few born with innate ability.

[gerbal]

Cost can be prohibitive for scaling an app from a proof of concept to a working prototype. Especially for something that can't or won't be commercialized later.

For instance, I'm working on a web app to visualize a particular subset of twitter activity. Scaling the database to cope with performance demands may prove challenging on free project tiers.

[firloop]

Wow, thanks! As a student who runs his own SaaS, this is incredibly valuable! I was able to immediately add the $1000 credit to my Stripe account, which I already use to process all my payments. Now I'm just looking for ways to best utilize the rest of the services. Big thanks to GitHub and all involved companies for creating a wonderful bundle for students.

[paradite]

I literally thought they are giving out backpacks so I was like WOW, then I realized it is a bunch of tools. Well, better than nothing, free server from DigitalOcean is pretty useful for me as a student to learn about deploying on an actual server instead of relying on 3rd party services like heroku.

[grayclhn]

Um... better than backpacks, I'd say.

[aet]

Free server? I thought it was $100 in credit. How far does $100 go?

[jqueryin]

That's an excellent bundle of free services for students.

Does the same price apply for teachers or what's the discounted rate?

I didn't get far enough along in the signup flow to see what the pricing was but did see teachers as an option.

[natebrennand]

generally they just rely on you having a .edu email address so I suspect you have access to the discounts.

[brokentone]

Super cool that modern software companies are applying an ethic the old-school software companies (Adobe, Microsoft) have used for a while.

The benevolent goal is to make good software affordable to those just learning and starting out.

The more sinister goal is to get young impressionable minds hooked on your software.

Regardless I support this, and I imagine a lot of people will be digging up their .edu email accounts to get this.

[DanAndersen]

This looks pretty awesome. I know that UE4 was already free for academic use, but previously you had to have a faculty member do the requesting of keys (I had to have my advisor get me one). It seems like this lets students get it more easily on their own.

[gprasanth]

Super important addition:

http://jetbrains.com/student/

[timv]

Just be aware that the license terms for JetBrains' student program are pretty strict.

  (a) Licensee may: ...
   (ii) use Software for non-commercial, educational purposes only, including conducting academic research or providing educational services

  (b) Licensee may not: ...
   (iii) use Software for any commercial purpose.

http://www.jetbrains.com/student/license.html

All of which is fair (it's free, and they don't owe you anything), but restrictive. Technically you can't even use if for your personal side projects unless they can be classified as "academic research"

[neito]

I dunno if it's just me, and I dunno how repersentative it is of their other products, but PyCharm always struck me as a bit overcomplicated. It's got little weirdnesses that make it less-than-great if you're opening, say, multiple different programs (like a student might) as opposed to one over-arching project.

[chk]

Thanks for this!

[coreymgilmore]

This is simply great. I can see this definitely helping expand the base of students who take on computer science or technology related fields of study. With these fields growing already, adding a package like this simply allows students to learn faster and use some of the best tools the industry offers.

While there are alternatives (Atom -> Sublime or Notepad++) for many of these services, the bundling of this all together should present students a logical next step instead of hunting around for a service right away.

[Mikushi]

I personally disagree, it removes the exploration part of learning how to code, which I believe to be vital to educating good programmers.

I see all these services listed, and all I think is "they are hooking these guys to a service oriented approach", a "pay $25 and you don't have to worry about X". Thing is, what you learn while trialling technologies is invaluable and should not be replaced by a preselected list of SaaS, many of which I would tell any beginner to stay away from.

[Already__Taken]

This is an amazing offering and I've no idea how I'd get any of my teachers to use a single one of those tools after 10+ years of teaching MS Office.

Education in the UK has a huge mountain to climb and it's not the kids that need to climb it.

I have people who want me to install visual basic (Not VB.NET) for them because they can find a lot of teaching material for it and won't touch python because "They're not doing that raspberry pi thing".

[PublicEnemy111]

Orchestrate looks really interesting. I'm currently building my senior project and might consider switching from my own hosted database. Anyone care to share experiences? I've built an app with parse and I personally wasn't a fan. Its great for small apps, but once you start scaling the pricing becomes an issue. I'm also wondering how big the performance hit is for a remote database

[andygmb]

This would be so, so useful to me as someone who left college last year & has been self-learning programming since (college was for a CCNA-esque qualification). I applied, but I don't know if I will qualify for it.

Could any of the github people in this thread let me know if I have a chance? The Digitalocean, namecheap, hackhands would be so insanely useful for me.

EDIT:

Thanks to John Britton from github for manually approving my request.

[codezero]

"If you're a student aged 13+ and enrolled in degree or diploma granting course of study"

So this doesn't include people in bootcamps? It seems like a ding to those programs that they aren't considered student developers by GitHub. This might be an oversight or a technicality, but it's too bad.

[xbryanx]

This is great. On an unrelated note, I wanted to give GitHub a big high-five for their non-profit organizational discounts. Tech companies that provide non-profit discounts really help non-profits where technology expenses are often under-appreciated and underfunded.

[maaaats]

Yeah, most tech companies do this, and it's awesome!

We get free GitHub plan (but try to run most stuff open source), free Jira by Atlassian and free IntelliJ by Jetbrains. Really helps us recruiting volunteers and makes it a fun and "real-life" experience for the involved students.

And of course we're now hooked on their services when moving to other projects in the future. ;)

[cdcarter]

Salesforce has done a VERY good job of both providing free/discounted licenses to non-profits and also pressuring SF Ecosystem/App vendors to providing similar free/discounted licenses. You can get started pretty quickly with a full on Salesforce install and quite a few useful apps completely free if you have under 10 users.

[johndbritton]

Thanks. For people that are curious, you can find said nonprofit discounts here: https://github.com/nonprofit

You get $25/month off, which is equivalent to a free Bronze plan with 10 private repositories. If you upgrade, you only have to pay the difference.

[sabman83]

I am confused about accessing the tools. My request got approved but how to make use of the credits? Like for Digital Ocean, I see in the comments people refer to promo codes. Where or how do I get those promo codes?

[anvarik]

There is a possibility to say that you have graduated in 2013, so you don't even need to be a student?? Didn't get. So if you hold a university mail and you've graduated last year, you can get one?