Last fall I started using GitHub to help me maintain and disseminate projects I work on. Not sure what GitHub is? From it’s main page, GitHub is a “Powerful collaboration, code review, and code management for open source and private projects.”

Built on top of the incredibly powerful version control system Git, GitHub provides users a friendly, intuitive wrapper for Git’s somewhat confusing system on the web (or the desktop!).

I could go on and on about how much I love Git or how GitHub has made working with peers/co-workers much less stressful, code reviews a pleasure, and handling complicated branches a breeze. It is pretty much awesome, right? Right. But it just got even MORE awesome!

One of my co-workers informed me she had signed up for a free student upgrade with GitHub. By default anyone can sign up and maintain as many public repositories as they like. However, in order to maintain private repositories one would need to sign up for at least a micro plan. Unaware of a student discount and always in search of a deal (every penny counts as a college student!) I wrote the GitHub support staff a quick email about my recent revelation.

In less than 24 hours the very friendly (and humorous) folks at GitHub had replied and upgraded my account to a free micro plan for two years! That’s a total savings of $168 (assuming prices don’t go up between now and then). Only if more companies were as student friendly. I give a tip of my hat to the folks at GitHub. I will be sure my local ACM chapter, peers, and developer friends know about this.

For more information about GitHubs student plan you can visit: https://github.com/edu

Additionally, I highly recommend reading more about Git itself. The good people who created it were kind enough to post a detailed, easy-to-read, and free book online here. If you are a book in hand kind of person, you can grab one from Amazon too!

Thanks, GitHub!

-H.