Must have for CS students: Github Student Developer Pack

May 22, 2024

by Christina Yang · 4 min read

Every CS student NEEDS Github Student Developer Pack. There is so much free stuff you can get – a must-have for any student coding or learning to code. Here’s are my favourite benefits:

Learning to Code

Disclaimer, I haven’t used most of these myself, definitely would have if I had known about them earlier:

Codex (6 months premium), gamified learning to code
Frontend Masters
educative (6 months free)
Scrimba (1 month free pro) I learned React.js with Scrimba ~3 years ago, really liked it because it was so interactive (code directly in tutorial). My knowledge of Scrimba is definitely outdated now, but would definitely recommend.
Interview Cake (1 week access) I tried this, but didn’t use it much. I think the lessons are good, but a lot were also topics I know about. I probably should have explored it more but I was limited on time.
Thinkful (1 month access to a web dev course)
SymfonyCasts (3 months free) learn PHP + Symfomy

Not from Github Student Developer Pack, but I would also recommend and is free:

CSSBattle CSS as a game. I’ve used this personally. I love it, it’s taught me a good deal about CSS, and I’ve had a lot of fun with it. It still amazes me how much you can do with plain CSS.

Code quality

Improve your code quality and catch small bugs with automated code reviews:

CodeScene (free student account) More for code quality
DeepScan (6 month free trial) More for bugs
Codecov free for students I use CodeScene and DeepScan to help/guide me in writing cleaner code, and prevent obvious bugs. Since most of my projects are individual, it’s definitely useful to get some feedback on my code.

Another way to improve your code quality is to contribute to open-source projects. This makes you follow existing code structures and methods of documentation, as well as get code reviews.

Open-source

OpenSauced Recommends open-source repositories to contribute to.

Projects

Simple Analytics I use this for monitoring website traffic. I like it because it’s very simple to implement and is focused on privacy.
ImgBot Automatically creates pull requests that compress images in your repositories.
Icons8 Gave me great icons to use for Lord of the Lakes
BrowserStack I use this for cross compatibility testing, really easy to use, can adjust devices and browsers + versions easily.

Payments

Stripe (Waived transaction fees on first $1000 in revenue processed) You need to email Stripe support to activate this, they are very responsive, and will ask you to send your account number as well as verify your Stripe account.

Error tracking

Sentry Really a must have. Sends you error reports. I only have this enabled for production, and has told me about a lot of errors I wouldn’t have known otherwise (people are not super likely to report errors I’ve found). I run out of replays almost immediately every month though 😭, so if someone knows how to better configure Sentry to not run out of resources, I’d love to hear about it

AWS

Not part of student developer pack, but AWS Activate Founders Program has helped me immensely in providing AWS credits so I can afford to work on my projects without draining money significantly like I was doing before joining the program, and I would highly recommend anyone using AWS for their projects to apply for it.