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!
> 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".
I think that there are programs dedicated to each idea. Some programs are dedicated to teaching basic programming literacy that everyone should know, while some are designed more as career training programs—often aimed at demographics that are underrepresented in the field.
> 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.
As someone who's gotten away from programming in the past few (er, several.. many... how old am I now anyway?) years, this kind of stuff is what keeps me from getting back in. I think "Oh, Clojure [or whatever] looks cool..." but by the time I get through installing a bunch of different programs and figuring out how to deploy something and whatnot, I never make it to really learning much. I just want to start up, you know, Borland Turbo C, and get to writing code.
I'm sure I'm making it more of a big deal than it is because I am old and cranky, but it really can seem daunting, even if it's only in appearance.
Polishing up a tiny corner of the tedium to make everyone's life a little easier is generally a rewarding effort that becomes out of date almost immediately.
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.
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.
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.
As a student (albeit a CS major), I immediately signed up and will be using many of these services. My friends and I have been looking at creating an app and these will def get us started for no money which is huge for us (especially the domain name, hosting services, and private repos).
While I don't feel overwhelmed by all the services, there are some of these I couldn't see how we would immediately use such as data analytics.
I'm not sure what you're after with paid HipChat (e.g., video/screen sharing, >5GB file uploads, etc.), but Slack[1] might get it done for you for free. Probably still not ideal depending on what you want, but a potential alternative nonetheless.
I use their free plan with several projects and love it. I am just a fan of their product and think other students/up-and-coming devs would appreciate it too.
I actually filed a support ticket yesterday trying to entice them to get on the list.
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.
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.
Yep, my code redeemed immediately. They even changed the copy to reflect this: "You can redeem your offer code using the link above, even if you have previously redeemed a different DigitalOcean promotional offer, credit card required for activation"
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.
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."
The input box doesn't come up for me, all I get is "The promo DIVEIN10 for $10.00 was applied to your account." which if I remember correctly, was when DO did codes over Twitter quite a while ago :p
Go to cloud.digitalocean.com/support and create a new ticket, giving them your promo code and asking nicely, and they'll put it through promptly in my experience
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.
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.
I agree that using free (libre) tools is preferable, but a lot of this facilitates that. For instance, you can deploy a GNU/Linux image using the DigitalOcean credit and gain experience deploying on a LAMP/LEMP stack and doing things like creating iptables rules and things like that, which is good real-world experience that is in no way temporary or platform dependent.
Git itself (as I'm sure you know) is a free tool, and learning git is a worthwhile skill no matter where you are using it. Hell, I know people who use git for collaborative document management.
And the SSL stuff and domains offered through namecheap are going to be helpful to anyone who wants to go into web development. Knowing how to set up a domain, with proper DNS records and SSL configurations, is a pretty basic task for people who do web stuff. And, again, these things are platform agnostic. I think there is a lot of value offered here, and not all of it serves the purpose of furthering vendor lock-in.
You'd learn a lot more deploying a lamp stack with Virtualbox or dropping 100 bucks on a used server off ebay and deploying something on it.
Honestly this offer is just like those gigantic coupon books you get in the mail that gives you discounts to all the local area restaurants (that paid up). It's great if you want a good deal if you want to go out, but it's not like anybody's doing you a favor.
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.
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.
Like the parent comment I recently got my two-year expiration notice, but I've now graduated. (Although my edu email still works...) At the start of 2010 I did the BitBucket deal and did all my school stuff exclusively with them, until finally GitHub offered their version. (I like GitHub's interface better. Even after they did a big overhaul to a design I liked less.) Unlike GitHub though my BitBucket account is still Unlimited, which is awesome. Consequentially I like Atlassian as a company much more. :)
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.
I'm sure you know, but you can just clone from bitbucket, then push it to github. You keep all your history and everything. I can dig that there's friction, though.
Since I've had 3 replies I'd like to clarify a bit.
- Github has a large enough network effect that I can ask for another student's Github account and expect that they will have one. That lowers the friction to getting a new project started.
- I have moved a repo from BitBucket to Github, it is about as easy as the comments state.
- That said, I haven't needed more than 5 private repos at once, and the ability to visit one site (and one interface) to view all my work is easier than visiting two sites.
Time and expertise to manage that server. It's cool that there's a Golang server out there that's a one binary solution to this among other offerings but some expertise and time is still required.
I would rather a student learn how to use git and the communities and tools around it first if both of these were options.
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 :)
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!
Screenhero, the most impressive bit of software I've used since licecap. So sad my company didn't subscribe after the free ride ended. Sadly stuck with hip chat and g hangouts.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you are using their $5/month plan than you get 20 months [1]. Obviously backups and other things will add a little to the cost but realistically easily a year of free server time.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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.
The exploration of modern programming is a big factor keeping people out. You don't get a computer with BASIC installed anymore, or magazines that teach you programming from start to finish with code samples included.
To figure out desktop programming, you have to download a compiler and hope there is a good tutorial on some random blog which most likely gave up after part two of a five part series. To figure out web programming you need a server and a domain name and wait what language are you using but then again what framework are you using and for the love of god how do I deploy I don't even know where Ubuntu keeps the /www folder and all of the tutorials I find expect me to know what an Angular is when I just learned what a Javascript is and I worked with Codecademy so I know Javascript but not how to use it to make a web page and I know Python but I still need to know HTML, CSS, and Javascript so I give up.
>The exploration of modern programming is a big factor keeping people out.
Is that a problem? From a professional perspective, it seems ideal to not pollute the field with people who are uninterested in such things, as they would very quickly run into issues keeping their knowledge up to date. The field has been and always will be in flux.
From an amateur perspective, I think it's fine if people are dissuaded, amateurs should do things they find enjoyable. If learning about your hobby isn't enjoyable, programming will offer little utility beyond minor entertainment.
While having a multitude of choices can make choosing difficult, it can also make it very easy, just pick anything. With not preconceived notions about how you want to program, all of the popular languages and frameworks are essentially equal to you. As you actually start to program, you'll be exposed to new concepts that you may or may not like. If you don't like them, you be able to trivially search for alternatives with your newfound knowledge of knowing what you like/dislike.
>...or magazines that teach you programming from start to finish with code samples included.
There's a stupid amount of free and non-free literature for getting into programming. Searching for just about any popular language and/or framework will get you at least one book on Amazon and an amazing amount of tutorials/walkthroughs/guides/etc from Google.
This mentality jives with the common hacker refrain that everyone should learn at least some programming, that people should know more about their computers, and with the general idea the knowledge is power. We shouldn't be looking to lock people out just because we don't want amateurs or hobbyists encroaching on our turf. Hackers by definition are not professional programmers. Would you seek to ensure that only college educated programmers are allowed to use a compiler? The idea isn't that it's difficult to get into in order to keep the riff raff out, it's that people who may genuinely enjoy the craft never even start because we've made it so damn difficult to get anything done.
As for the free education, I wrote a whole section on the terrible state of teaching programming, from free blogs to Codecademy. There are many better-worded arguments saying that programming education falls short of what it should be as well.
We should be encouraging more people to program, especially if it means they can do it without a college degree. The amount of people in the world without access to a college education is appalling, but we still want them contributing. What we don't need is elitism.
Incredible synopsis of my first 3 months of programming.
You are right in that the umbrella term "programming" is incredibly daunting to a person who has never written a line of code. Everyone knows that more options does not translate to better outcome all of the time. To step into the world of programming today is to step into a dictionary of dictionaries. It's scarily awesome.
Is modern programming hard to learn, or is it more that people want to do more fancy stuff than before, and quicker? Making a java app is hard for the uninitiated, but compiling a few java classes just requires a compiler (essentially) and to memorize a few commands (or use something like Dr Java). Making a slick web app in RRails is probably pretty daunting, but writing some HTML doesn't even require a server, just a web browser.
There are a lot of interesting problems that can be tackled with simple tools (how about writing a toy compiler in C, for example). Will such things be useful? Probably not, but the learning experience is very valuable. And that's already a good outcome for someone who is only getting their feet wet.
(That said, I'm a relative beginner myself, and I'm kind of itching to make something that is actually useful, at this point. But things like learning language specific package managers, make tools, and other stuff that are needed can be taxing.)
Well that's a big thing, I think. Back in the 80's, your computer came with BASIC, ran on BASIC, and you could do things that were considered cool with just a few days of learning BASIC. You could actually do something real with BASIC. And even when I was in high school, a few days of learning Visual Basic and you had a pretty neat application to use. I don't think schools teach that anymore because it's not considered a good or pragmatic language to learn.
So now we have all this computing power and these powerful and easy to use languages and a broad distribution network and thousands of developers and teachers and applications to learn from and programming has only gotten harder. Think about that one. We've stepped back from BASIC to make programming harder. Because we expect more from our programs now, but we haven't put any effort into making it easier to do even the most simple thing.
I'm still drawing interfaces with tens of lines of code. In Visual Basic, I just drew them on the screen. In Java, I'm fighting to get things aligned or sized right or in the right order, to the point where in my Java class I took there was two weeks dedicated to getting to grips with Swing. So we abstract the hard stuff away... with more code. And though we abstract it away to make it easier, we still look down on language like Visual Basic, because real programmers don't draw their interfaces with a mouse, they do it in code with vim or emacs.
Just look at the mindset of one of the other people who responded to me. "We want to make it harder so amateurs can't do it". Fuck that shit. We have the power to make it easier but we don't.
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.
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".
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
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.
"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.
We definitely care about folks in bootcamps, but it's a bit more difficult to arrange access for them. If you run a bootcamp, feel free to email education@github.com and we'll try and help you and your students out.
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.
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. ;)
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.
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?
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?
This is going to be helpful to many students, but...
But the constraints imposed by not being able to pay for third-party services during my years as a student have been the main motivator behind tinkering with setting up my own services and finding (FLOSS) alternative solutions to the well-known applications the grown ups were using.
I think one has to "suffer" through all the required stages in order to grok all the IT/CS/CSE problems and tradeoffs that exist out there. I also think this suffering is needed to appreciate why these service are good.
i totally agree on this, I feel that I am already too dependent on 3rd-party services like heroku. however, i feel that the free server offered by DigitalOcean should be a good place to try stuff without extra help?
Many school/colleges outside NA/Europe (eg: even topmost science/engineering colleges in India) don't necessarily provide an institutional .edu email ID but you can still verify using college/library ID cards and say semester exams marksheet or such. So is this pack available for such students?
You don't need an edu email to participate. You can sign up with any school issued email address, student ID card, or other official proof of enrollment.
I love that I have this resource as an option. The only thing that makes me question this is the lack of tools that I would find useful as a student. These tools seems to align more with "students who are looking to release a product outside of their school work," then just a student.
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.
On one hand, this is great, and the services offered are first class. On the other, when if not at school is the time to run your own mail/git/dns/... server?
I think calling it a 'trial' is actually a disservice. Most of these are good for the entire time you're a student or two years. Most trials are limited to 30, 60, or maybe 90 days if you're lucky.
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 identification card, or other official proof of enrollment"
So I need to pay money to a big institution to be considered a student? Many 'students' would probably be in a better financial situation than a non-'student' who is trying to learn. Somehow 'education' has turned into a tool for passing on privilege.
I do agree this pack is not meant for everyone. And I also agree that these guys would find it hard to differentiate between a real learner and one who is not. But I'm amazed they didn't think about linking it with a coursera course or something. Anyways, I've spent 10 minutes thinking about this and they've probably spent 10 weeks. They've done more research, I might be missing something.
> Many 'students' would probably be in a better financial situation than a non-'student' who is trying to learn. Somehow 'education' has turned into a tool for passing on privilege.
Without that, how would they validate who is a student vs not? I know nothing of Go but want to learn. Am I not a 'student'?
I understand what you are saying, but without being an actual verifiable student they would be giving this away to the world
Further, with all of the thousands of dollars saved by not being a traditional student, surely there is some money for these services out of pocket (not all of which are 100% required to learn)
> Without that, how would they validate who is a student vs not?
What? Why would they need to?
Those "perks" are only appealing to somebody who's learning or a hobbyist. They are absolutely worthless to a professional. I will burn through them in a week.
Github is just trying to market this to kids. It has nothing to do with learning or providing a better value proposition. It's all about hooking them into your brand early. Nothing wrong with that, but that's what it is.
Well it's worked for many years for Microsoft too.
Adobe, do it as well I think, though they're close to a monopoly with Photoshop.
Have people become so accustomed to using your software that it's easier for them to pay for it than to transition to another company's products or indeed to go with FOSS alternatives.
their point is that this is a package meant to financially aid those in the process of learning, but it's restricted to learners who are already privileged enough to be part of the expensive system (maybe some of them through grants or loans).
Isn't it worth mentioning that a package meant to give people access to expensive learning resources isn't available to those who need it most?
It's treating "student" as the individual's current occupation, which seems reasonable. But if you are conducting your own unaffiliated independent study that eats up most of your workday, you can probably get in touch with them and get a waiver.
You absolutely can! I used to teach an informal free class on CSS (http://magicofcss.com). Even though I wasn’t a teacher at any actual school GitHub kindly gave me and my students access to free private repos for educational use. (See https://education.github.com/guide for more information.)
I think that's a filter more than anything else. You know they'd get hammered otherwise. Even Coursera or the like wouldn't be a good filter, since anyone can sign up. Perhaps they could have a filter based on completed courses through the various online options (Coursera, Code School, Treehouse, etc)
Same in France. I paid €5 for my fifth and last year of higher education that started this September, and I get €250/mo during 10 months to help me pay for food/housing/books. Students in more confortable situations paid 450€ and don’t get any money during the year, but that’s still pretty cheap.
I want to emphasize here a common misconception of 'free'. Your education is not free, some may even argue it is more expensive than the US system. Myself included. You pay an extraordinary amount of taxes for the 'free' education. You pay for it regardless if you decide to attend university or not. Letting the 'rich' pay for it is not an economic solution either. Hence the outrage in the US of moving toward the European socialist model, most do not want anything close to it.
> You pay an extraordinary amount of taxes for the 'free' education.
I once made a rough comparison, in the 60k–100k yearly salary range, for tax rates between Finland and California. As far as I remember, they were quite similar.
Just, in Finland you get (almost) free education, (almost) free health care, better public transportation and worse national defense.
I'd be happy to do this again, if you (or someone) provide the California numbers, I'll do Finland.
Yes yes...Finland and California are the same everything. So interchangeable that one could live in CA or Finland and have the same life style....no. Cost != value. On that though...worse national defense...you realize the US has the largest armed militia in the world...the people. Good luck with Russia!
> I need to think this through carefully, but your reasoning may very well apply to health-care too.
I haven't seen the numbers on education, but certainly no OECD country has healthcare more expensive than that in the US. Heck, many pay less in public funds than the US, even though the private healthcare costs in the US are a little bit higher than the public costs -- and this was true before the Affordable Care Act, just to forestall anyone who might blame "ObamaCare".
Let's go through some simple logic here...other countries have less expensive healthcare, they pay less in public redistributions for healthcare, and that equates to a better healthcare system? If I'm a skilled doctor, from an microeconomic stand point, I'm going to work in a place that has higher compensation. You seem to go under the assumption that less expensive = better...
He's not assuming any such absurd implication. He's assuming (quite charitably) that you are not completely ignorant of the basic facts of the healthcare debate: that the US system is vastly more expensive than any other country and produces sub-par outcomes when compared to other developed countries. (In the US, the rich can get top-notch healthcare, but this does little to bring up the averages.)
No, other developed countries have generally comparable results in concrete outcome measurements to the US, as well as lower (per capita and per GDP) public + private costs, and better access (universal, generally) to non-emergency care.
Additionally, several also have lower public + private costs than the US's public costs (which in turn are lower than US private costs).
Congratulations! You successfully responded with negative sarcasm and absolutely no constructive criticism or counter points. You sir are the winner of the internets! Enjoy your day.
>>Hence the outrage in the US of moving toward the European socialist model, most do not want anything close to it.
"Most" do not want anything close to it, or the rich do not want anything close to it?
I'm absolutely certain that most people in the US would vote for free healthcare and education. The problem of course is that politicians and special interest groups make sure things never get to that stage.
This isn't just being incredibly pedantic[1], it is more importantly incredibly insulting. I assure you, most people are intelligent enough to realize that money doesn't grow on trees, that the "free" education is funded by someone, and that it is (in most cases) funded by them the people, indirectly. Indeed, this is not some secret that "Europe" is blissfully ignorant to, and that they would abolish the second that they finally put the pieces together, perhaps aided by enlightened individuals such as yourself.
[1] "Free" in this context means that it is subsidized by the government, and it is probably funded by some taxation. Do you have a better word for it, that isn't impractically wordy and awkward? Then convince us to use that.
> So I need to pay money to a big institution to be considered a student? Many 'students' would probably be in a better financial situation than a non-'student' who is trying to learn.
This points out sort of the paradox we have here...it's argued that you should just "learn to code," but then they're requiring here that in order to do this you need to be part of some larger engine of learning that my or may not have anything to do with what you're trying to learn in the first place. So which is it?
In order to sign up for this student pack, you need to be part of a larger institution. You can still learn to code without signing up for this student pack.
I've thought about this a lot generally. Mostly because I went to college in Canada and didn't have a .edu email address, made it really hard for me to get these kinds of discounts. Plus, who says you need to be in traditional education anyway.
If anyone wants the DO portion of this and are not enrolled in traditional education but learning code full time and thinks they should get it regardless: email me: john@do.co
You contact the platform and you tell them. That's what happened with GitHub and Jetbrains, my university domain wasn't accepted by them, some students contacted them and both times they were fast to react. Sure it's harder than with an .edu email address but it's far from being an issue.
Sadly I can only do something about the DigitalOcean part, but like I said above, if anyone wants to make the case I'm happy to apply the credit for those enrolled in the full time study of code/serverz/whatever. :)
>Many 'students' would probably be in a better financial situation than a non-'student' who is trying to learn. Somehow 'education' has turned into a tool for passing on privilege.
What? You mean to say that students, who spend all their time studying (and pay tuition in some countries), are in a better financial position than people who has either free time and don't pay tuition, or has a full-time job?
They give it to students because that the reality is that students often don't have any spare money for tools, but they do indeed need/use them for their education etc.
Did you consider those who don't have the time to work a full time job? I'm interning as a Junior Webdev for 9 hours a day on no pay, and college is out of reach (financially) for me, although admittedly I'm probably a minority.
It's not surprising that many of my students friends do have alot of excess cash though, considering that student living costs are relatively low and they often benefit from a wide range of discounts on amenities like internet etc.
Latam has lots of public (free) Universities, they all give you some sort of email.
Besides you need some easy way to check if someone is a student or not and the most easy way to delegate this job is to require an email from an institution.
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.
My first time setting up a server with SSL was last week after buying a PositiveSSL certificate from Namecheap.
This issue bit me hard. I was extremely frustrated for a few hours when my browser said the site was fine but OpenSSL spat out a generic failure message when trying to get a page in ruby.
Discovering that the browser caches certificates made me realize that it wasn't an OpenSSL or ruby environment issue and lead me down the path to discovering that my server setup was wrong; I needed to explicitly provide intermediate certificates. Prior to that, I figured it happened automatically (as it seemed to with my browser).
I wish I'd seen this writeup before. It would have saved me a bunch of time. In retrospect, Commodo's instructions lacked important information. Your page, on the other hand, actually explains what I needed to do.
EDIT: I should mention that support was quick at getting back to me for an unrelated question about their website. Their lacking instructions notwithstanding, I'd still wholeheartedly recommend PositiveSSL.
I think you are right, they all might have at least 1 Intermediate CA cert...
But with the basic certs it's 1 or 2 levels deeper, and the bundle file is not provided ready-to-go after the purchase.
I remember some years back you could either use a single-root cert (with just your SSLCertificateFile file), or with 1 Intermediate CA that you would just use as the SSLCertificateChainFile file.
It's pretty, well, stupid to issue from a root. That means the root has to be connected to the internet, and the CA would have to have trust revoked in the entire root should it be compromised.
COMODO provides all the files in the ZIP sent to you via email. Don't know about others.
This was really weird. TheVerge actually spoiled the launch of this last night.
I was searching around and Google cached a Verge news story about this thing. However, the story was taken down and education.github.com/pack was a blank page.
Giving students gratis access to proprietary software is anti-educational. There are plenty of top-notch free software programs that students (and everyone!) should be using instead of relying upon SaaSS and other types of proprietary software. Having the freedom to read and modify the source code of the programs you use is a great way to learn to be a better developer.
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!