43. The GitHub Student Developer Pack

Anupam Dagar is now a final-year undergraduate Computer Science student at Indian Institute of Information Technology, in Allahabad. He tells Joe Kutner, a software architect at Heroku, about how he first came across the GitHub Student Pack as a freshman. He needed a domain name, and one of his senior classmates advised him to take a look at the pack, which provides free tools for any student over the age of 13.

With the Student Developer Pack, Anupam was able to build a project called HoxNox, a portfolio generator. He noticed that a lot of his friends were spending a lot of time perfecting their resumes on paper, so he decided to create a website that took the process digital. With an urge to keep honing his skills, HoxNox was his most ambitious project to date. With companies providing hosting and emailing services through the pack, he was able to build something that became quite successful.

Anupam strongly encourages students to not get bogged down between deciding which language or framework to make use of when starting their projects. The fundamental principles of software engineering are applicable to all of them, including catching errors and writing maintainable code. He found it useful to just start with one new part of the tech stack to work on, before mastering it and moving on to something newer. It's also important to consider yourself as more than just your code. Talking to people and building a healthy community is just as important, perhaps moreso.

Links from this episode

• Anupam's project HoxNox, a free and easy portfolio generator
• Python Django, the web framework he used
• The GitHub Student Developer Pack
• Heroku for GitHub Students