By Eesa Zahed
If you are in high school or college/university and are interested in coding, you should consider signing up for GitHub education. This allows you to use GitHub Pro, as well as having many other benefits. If you do not already have a GitHub account, you will need to create one. Sign in with your personal email address (so you can use your account even after your school email address gets deactivated when you graduate).
Next, go to settings and click Emails. Here is where you will add your school email to your GitHub account.
Add your school email address and verify it. Once it is verified, go to https://education.github.com/. This will allow you to be eligible for GitHub Pro. Sign in with your GitHub account.
Then, head to Benefits. Scroll down and click Get student benefits.
Select Student as your academic status. Scroll down and use your school email address. After that, you have to select your school name as your school. Using a few sentences, explain why you are using GitHub.
Once you have completed those steps, press continue.
You’ll need to verify you’re a student at your school. Therefore, upload a screenshot of an email from your school board or another official school document. It’ll take a few days to verify, so you’ll have to wait until then.
After that has been completed, you should see your dashboard looking something like this:
You'll have the options for many student benefit offers, including a $200 Digital Ocean credit, a free domain from Namecheap, and the JetBrains IDE. However, in this tutorial you will be learning how to get the Replit Hacker plan for free (which is not mentioned as a student benefit offer).
Once you have GitHub Pro, you’ll have access to many other benefits as well. One of the most notable benefits is a free Replit Hacker Plan for one year.
If you don't know what Replit is, it is a web-based IDE, which allows users to create amazing projects (called Repls) that are stored on the cloud. I have found Replit incredibly useful for coding in Rust, as it makes installing packages and setting up the dev environment really simple and easy. You can also import GitHub repositories directly into Replit, so you can work on your code from any device, as long as you have internet connection.
Replit is free to sign up, but having the Hacker plan gives you certain benefits that are extremely useful for development. One notable benefit is having unlimited private Repls. Some more advantages are having 10x the account storage, and double the Repl storage. This plan starts at $7.00 a month, but luckily for students, there is a way to obtain the plan for free. (Source)
If you don’t have a Replit account, create one with your personal email address (so you can use your account even after you school email address gets deactivated when you graduate)
Next, head to Account.
Scroll down to Connected services and connect your GitHub account.
Therefore, you should have GitHub Pro (until you graduate) and Replit Hacker (for one year).
Enjoy!
Now with your upgraded accounts, I hope you enjoy creating amazing things! Feel free to check out my GitHub and Replit to view my projects.
If you'd like to reach out, my email address is eszhd1 (at) gmail.com