Essential tools and services for student developer
The world has changed and almost all established organisations are promoting their tools and services for free to students so that they can play with it, have hands-on experience and pay once the basic set of free features are not filling their requirements. Due to limited resources and lack of personal earnings, studenthood mainly looks for free software and this post is regarding the essential tools and service which a developer student might need in course of learning web development, machine learning, networking, etc. Not only this, you can easily host your portfolio which will help you in job applications.
Github Education Pack
Github along with many organisations have collaborated to make an entire suite of a starter pack for student developers. Once you enrol, you can use those services for 1 year and you have to renew the pack by applying again every year. Here are a few most useful services:
For Indian students having no ".edu" emails, you can upload your identity card of the institution for verification, read more
- DigitalOcean: You can start your server and use other services as 50$ of credits are provided. No credit card verification is required to use the credits.
- Namecheap: You can create a new domain(e.g. yourname.com) for your blog, personal or project website.
- Jetbrains: You can easily use advanced IDEs for development purposes. Jetbrains tools are good to handle large codebase and develop large applications.
- BrowserStack: It can be very useful for testing your application on different devices and OS.
- Transifex: Can be used for running an application in multiple languages.
There are more than 40 services which are provided for different use cases, you can read more about the education pack. You can easily save more than 200$/year using this pack.
Link - Apply for Github Education Pack
Amazon Web Services (AWS) - Free Tier
AWS is a cloud computing platform which provides more than 100 services for hosting application, setting up alerts for a service, heavy computation for Artificial Intelligence related tasks, storing files online, setting up Content Delivery Networks(CDN), etc. AWS provides a free tier to every new user after debit/credit card verification. These days Virtual Credit Cards are provided by banks which can be used for verification purposes. Few services provided by AWS are:
- Amazon EC2 - It's a virtual machine in which can boot different OS, select a different configuration of the machine in terms of physical memory, storage, region, etc. You can use it to host your application, learn Linux commands, etc.
- Amazon S3 - It's a storage service for your files and resources which are available online.
- Amazon SageMaker - It can be used to train models for machine learning and much more
Link - Apply for AWS free tier
Coursera Certification Courses
Coursera offers most of the educational courses for free and charge for certification after the end of the course. So, if you're looking for adding certificates on LinkedIn profile and resume, you can apply for financial aid provided by Coursera for almost all specialisation courses. It is recommended to only opt for financial aid if you cannot afford the fee and you need to fill an application stating reason and proofs. You will get the scholarship instantly from Coursera since it is an automated process. You can read more about Financial Aid here.
LinkedIn Free Premium Subscription (3 months)
With LinkedIn Premium you can increase your chances of being shortlisted for a job opening, see in-depth details of a company which you're about to join, send InMails to recruiters who are not in your contact list, etc. Since Microsoft has recently acquired LinkedIn, You can use the Microsoft's Visual Studio Dev essentials service to subscribe to LinkedIn Learning (LinkedIn Premium) for one month without even entering any payment details. With the credit card, you can easily extend this subscription up to 3 months. Read the article below mentioned explaining step-by-step for getting three months of free premium subscription.
Link - Step-by-step guide
I will keep on updating this article as I come across other essential services that can ease your learning and increase practical knowledge. Also, if you come across any other service which helped you in course of learning, share it in the comment section.