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GitHub Student Developer Pack

education.github.com

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Re: GitHub Student Developer Pack

#52

> PositiveSSL from Namecheap (for $9) I have one of these, they work great. The one and only problem they have is they require 2 or 3 intermediary CA certs that need to be "bundled" into a file. After buying one, and finding the Comodo provided instructions lacking the needed info, I put together a howto for both Windows and Linux (for Apache) - http://www.devside.net/wamp-server/installing-comodo-positiv...

All CA's require a bundle, just an FYI.

Comodo has two because they have the structure like this:

=> Old Root (with trust everywhere)

==> New Root (with limited trust)

===> Issuing Intermediary

====> Your Cert (no trust without intermediary)

Re: GitHub Student Developer Pack

#53
post #21

With the growing amount of free online courses, it's a shame there isn't a good way to share resources like this to people who want to self-educate just to learn and better themselves. Instead they must also be burdened with extra costs of enrolling in an institution.

This is an interesting point. The offer is nice, but does not offer anything that you can't get from the open source community or companies that have free trial plans. I'd say that learning these days is much cheaper than it was years ago. You don't need to get a server to push code, because you can use something like Heroku (php, python, ruby, java) or Azure (for .NET). Bitbucket is free. Multiple IDEs and/or text editors better than Atom are free (or have a trial plan). Etc.

Re: GitHub Student Developer Pack

#54

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 i…

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.

Re: GitHub Student Developer Pack

#55
post #23

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 to…

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 o…

Wholeheartedly agree. Specific to the actual trial and error, of programming, when I first started learning C++ (a long time ago), I remember the dread of running the debug. Then coming up with a small number of errors in 10's of 1000's of lines of code, and having to comb through to see where I was missing a semi-colon… I think knowing to how to code from ground up is so important. Knowing the fundamentals, and not just knowing how to manipulate someone else's platform. Once you know how to do it, you can make the choice to take shortcuts, but if you start with the shortcuts, and they become unavailable, you're up a creek… I have a web-designer friend of mine that knows how to use Wordpress CSS very well. He can manipulate and research to problem solve. But I'd put dollars to donuts that if I asked him to write a CSS or any other program for that matter from scratch, he wouldn't have the foggiest.

I know this GitHub is geared toward helping students getting ideas up, running, and selling, so toward the latter, it's invaluable, and actually quite generous. I'm still an old fuddy-duddy, and think that it's best to understand how to build the mechanism before buying it off the shelf.

Re: GitHub Student Developer Pack

#56

Awesome service guys. The following criticism is not for github, but for our culture as a whole. I cannot get myself to agree with how our culture has come to describe a 'student'. An example would be the following: "If you're a student aged 13+ and enrolled in degree or diploma granting course of study, the GitHub Student Developer Pack is for you. All you need is a school-issued email address, valid student identif…

If you really want to 'abuse' student status, you can enroll in night classes somewhere and normally you can claim a free .edu or .ac.uk (or whatever) account. Ultimately there must be a differentiator so that not everyone can sign up and bankrupt the generous companies offering the discounts.

Re: GitHub Student Developer Pack

#58

Nice, 13+ - I assume high school student can apply? Like to get my daughter and few of her buddies to sign up for this to do a few web / mobile projects. Not limited to just .edu email address, right? Her high school doesn't have that.

I'm in HS (got the discount in MS) and I don't have an EDU email (.org). Was approved regardless, so they should be good.

Re: GitHub Student Developer Pack

#59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What parts of the overall ecosystem do you consider a necessity for private repos?

I like starting a school-related project as a private Github repo, then as time or permission allows for to open it up as a public repo. I've open-sourced a few things this way, whereas the couple Bitbucket repos have been left to languish since I don't have a limit on private repos or the ecosystem to share it with.

You can always push your private BitBucket repos to public Github ones -- just add another remote and push there.
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