Free stuff for academic software developers
It’s Black Friday, which seems as good a time as any to flag up a couple of year-round discounts available to academics who write code as part of their work.
Generally speaking, GitHub users can have as many public repositories as they like, but have to pay for private repositories. However, if you’re working as an academic or otherwise writing code for research or teaching, you can “request a discount” for either a user or organisation account. Give it a few days, and you should get the ability to create free repositories for nothing.
GitHub is the first place most people think of when considering version control services, but there are alternative platforms. One of the most high-profile alternatives is BitBucket, and it also gives free private repositories to academics – but in this case you just need to sign up using your st-andrews.ac.uk email address to get them.
If you would like to know more about using Git, consider coming along to one of our Software Carpentry workshops. Our workshop on 4-6 December is full, but watch out for more next semester.