John Britton – GitHub’s Education Evangelist

There’s no substitute for real world experience, but for most students, real world tools can be cost prohibitive. For the novice developer, coder, hacker, and open source fanatics among us there’s currently a pretty interesting offer from GitHub. All you need is proof that you are a student, e.g. a university email account and have fun creating digital wonders!

The developer platform GitHub has started with the “Student Developer Pack” a free program for students, research assistants and professors. The program provides a set of 14 developer tools that gives students credits or free access to services, including payments platform Stripe, domain registrar Namecheap, and GitHub.

If you’re a student aged 13+ and enrolled in a degree or diploma granting course of study, the GitHub Student Developer Pack is for you. Enrolnment students need a school-issued email address, valid student identification card, or other official proof of enrollment to join the program.

Among other perks, they also receive 25 minutes of free programming help, access to game development tools through their student tenure and fee-less processing of up to $1,000 in payments.

“Students would write and ask GitHub for tools—a lot of companies are happy to do it, but it’s ad-hoc,” said John Britton, GitHub’s education evangelist. “It’s an administrative burden. We thought, ‘If we’re going to do the administrative work anyway, why not offer other tools as well and take the admin responsibility?’”

“We want to help students get access to real-world tools, real-world experience to learn how to think programmatically and algorithmically and how to apply computing power to what they want to accomplish,” he added.

The full list of tools in the GitHub Student Developer Pack includes: open source text editor Atom, cloud host Bitnami, data collection platform CrowdFlower, cloud host provider DigitalOcean, DNS management provider DNSimple, live programming help HackHands, domain registration company Namecheap, Database as a service provider Orchestrate, screen sharing partner Screenhero, email infrastructure provider SendGrid, mobile payment platform Stripe, integration and development system Travis CI, game development tools Unreal Engine and developer platform GitHub itself.

While this is a charitable initiative from GitHub, it will not only be beneficial to students. Once developers and engineering students have become accustomed to certain services, they will stick to the ecosystem they know, despite the fact that their free offer has expired. In other words, it will benefit GitHub partners.

More than 100,000 students have already taken advantage of free access to GitHub, collectively pushing code more than 50,000 times per day. Students can access all the offers at https://education.github.com/pack.