Yesterday, Next Tech launched as part of GitHub's Student Developer Pack. I'm super excited to be a part of it, but man, the Pack is just an incredible resource for students. Totally something I wish I'd had when I was in school!

So here's a quick mind dump of why it's so awesome (IMO) and a few reasons you should definitely check it out if you're a student.

Reason #1: $45,000 of FREE stuff! 🤯

The Pack gets you access to almost $45,000 worth of resources!! I'm not 100% sure how they calculate this, but GitHub says it, so it must be true:

College was expensive even when I went long ago (in 2010...), and I know it's only gotten more so since then. So I think it's great that the Pack helps students out with this by giving them all these great resources, enabling them to build awesome software without the cost of tools standing in their way.

The Pack DOUBLED in size this school year, which is just incredible. There are now 41 awesome deals! I've covered a few of my favorites below, but you should definitely check them all out.

Reason #2: So many great deals! 😍

The Pack is really diverse. There are so many different things you can build with it! Here are a few of my favorite deals (other than Next Tech's, of course!):

DigitalOcean

I love DigitalOcean because they've done an excellent job of walking the line between a powerful cloud hosting platform and an easy to use tool. As someone who has also used Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure over the years, I've really come to appreciate simplicity in cloud offerings.

Services like AWS and the others can do a LOT more than DigitalOcean, but in reality, you don't need that right now! Heck, Next Tech could probably even run it's entire site on top of DigitalOcean, if we wanted to (right now we're on Google Cloud). So it's plenty powerful.

Heroku

I first used Heroku years ago when I started writing web apps. It's even simpler than DigitalOcean to get up your first app, so it's a great resource when you're first getting started and just want to get your ideas up there (into the cloud).

It is good to eventually transition to something like DigitalOcean in my opinion, because you'll get much more experience with running your own servers if you do. But for just getting up a project for a class or as a first web app, Heroku is great!

SendGrid

This is a tool we use at Next Tech for sending emails. It allows you to send a massive number of emails, which is really handy when doing something like sending confirmation emails to new users. If you just use a personal email for this, you'll eventually get rate limited, and need a tool like SendGrid to get around this.

You can also use SendGrid's email template designer right on their website, which makes your emails look professional without that much effort on your part. Once you're done, you send these emails using SendGrid's API, which makes it very flexible, and also gets you some great experience with APIs!

Sentry

Sentry will alert you when a user of your application gets an error, and then provide you with useful debugging information you can use to fix it. They also do useful grouping of errors which can help you see what the most important bugs are for you to focus on.

I haven't used Sentry before, but we use a very similar tool (Bugsnag) to monitor for errors in our application. When I first started building web apps, I didn't know much about error monitoring, but after starting to use it, you'll never stop.

As you can see above, the Pack gets you 500,000 events/month, where each "event" is an error being triggered. For what you build while in school, this should be more than enough!

Termius

Termius merges your SSH sessions across Linux, OS X, Windows, iOS, and Android. If you don't know already, SSH stands for "Secure Shell", and allows you to access your computer remotely using either a password or a private key (recommended).

I haven't used Termius yet (I just learned about it yesterday, when they got added to the Pack), but I plan on doing it ASAP. I use another tool to do something similar from my phone, but this looks like it may work much better!

.tech Domains

Last but not least, the fancy .tech domains. The Pack gets you one free .tech domain for one year. As the owner of next.tech, I may be a bit biased, but I think this deal is really cool.

Reason #3: The Pack is really well done 💎

GitHub works closely with the Pack members. This may not seem like that great of a reason, but having just gone through the onboarding process with them, I have learned a few things from working with the Pack team:

They really care about what they're doing. So as a student, you can rest assured that they have your best interests at heart!
They make sure that each new deal brings a lot of value to the Pack for students. This makes it well worth your time to get access to the Pack.
They work hard to ensure that each Pack offer makes it easy for students to redeem their offer.

How to Get the Pack 🚀

Getting started with the Pack is really easy. Just head here to get started! They'll walk you through a quick approval process, and then you can get started with redeeming your offers.

Next Tech's promotion 👩‍💻👨‍💻

Once you have your Pack, if you're interested in learning a new tech skill or want to write some code online, come grab your free year on Next Tech. All you have to do is sign up with GitHub.