DEV Community: Pj Metz

Campus Experts Applications: July 2025!

Pj Metz — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 23:34:01 +0000

Campus Experts Applications open at 9 PM, PT, June 30, 2025

GitHub Campus Experts are student leaders that strive to build diverse and inclusive student communities.These communities are centered around bridging the gap between classrooms and industry by emphasizing the skills necessary for success in software development careers. GitHub Campus Experts can be found across the globe leading in-person and online conferences, meetups, hackathons, and maintaining open-source projects. These students come from a wide range of backgrounds, but all have one thing in common: they are deeply passionate about technology and the people in it.

And we’re looking for a few more.

In the 8 years since its inception, the program has supported more than 500 students in building technical communities around the world. As local leaders, Campus Experts know the challenges students face at their school. They work closely with their peers to close the gap between industry and academia by creating new opportunities for students to learn industry-valued skills. What’s more, being part of the program provides students with valuable resources and training to ensure that they have everything they need to face their challenges, achieve their goals, and better serve their community.

This is why every application cycle we receive thousands upon thousands of applications to the program. We keep the number of experts low in order to be able to better serve their needs as they serve the needs of their communities. Therefore, it necessitates that we are careful about how many are admitted to the program each year. Of the 5000 plus applications we received in 2024, only 50 were selected to begin training as Campus Experts. We anticipate around 50 Campus Experts in the July 2025 class out of thousands of applicants.

A note about what we are not: GitHub Campus Experts are not brand ambassadors. You need not be a Git expert or even a computer science major. Campus Experts are passionate about one thing: expanding the industry specific knowledge of their peers by being the conduit through which they learn new technologies and best practices.

What makes a great Campus Expert?

A great Campus Expert means you’re a university student who loves tech events: hackathons, webinars, live coding sessions, workshops, and more. You love to share any knowledge you have with others and love teaching and helping others achieve their goals. Your favorite way to work is on a team, building something bigger than any one person can do on their own, a student who is community focused and driven to expand the opportunities available to everyone on their campus. You are an advocate for your peers and colleagues and seek to bring multiple perspectives and backgrounds into tech by encouraging diversity and inclusion both in and out of your community.

Criteria

To apply, you must:

Have the GitHub Student Developer Pack.
Be 18 years of age or older.
Be enrolled in a formal higher education institution.
Have at least one full year left before graduating.
Have had a GitHub account for at least six months.

What We Want to Learn About You

The first thing we want to do is get to know our applicants better, the questions we ask seek to learn more about your:

Motivation. What makes you tick? What drives you? Why do you do what you do?
Interest. Why do you want to be part of the program? What is your goal in applying?
Growth and potential. What kind of skills do you want to learn, and how will they help you grow personally and professionally?
Contribution. What kind of an impact have you made/do you want to make on your campus for your peers and community?

How the Application Process Works

The application process consists of two sections: an application form and then a video resume. You’ll have a full month to submit the form(Applications close at 09:00:00 pm Pacific Time on July 31, 2025). Once applications to the program close, the GitHub Education team will review all the applications that came in. This review period can take as long as a month. If the team would like to move forward with you, we’ll reach out with instructions about how to submit your video resume. You will then have two weeks to submit the video portion of the application. After we review the videos, which can take up to 3 weeks, we will notify all video applicants of their status in the program: either acceptance or declination.

Form Application

In the form, we’re looking for students to tell us about the challenges their student community faces, what opportunities they want to build for their peers, as well as the potential they see for growth. These questions are designed to be answered completely and thoroughly. Make sure you have written just enough to convey your point to the reader. Not too short, not too long; answer enough to fully explain without over-explaining.

In February 2024 (and again in August 2024), many applications we saw were clearly written by generative AI. We want to make sure that we make it abundantly clear that we want to learn about YOU and your voice in these applications, not an LLM’s voice. This means that Chat GPT and other generative AI should not be answering these questions for you.** We do not ever move through with those applications that used AI to create their answer. Yes, it’s OFTEN very obvious.**

We know many of you want to have the best possible application, and that you might be worried about grammar mistakes and thus use AI to help you overcome that. There are many tools that can help you with spelling, tone, and other grammar considerations without totally writing an answer for you. Asking AI to check your grammar on a response you wrote yourself is very different from giving generative AI the application questions and having the AI give an answer (as we saw happen countless times in last year's applications). The answers AI gives are generic and you are a unique individual! So use your own voice and be sure to fill out these questions with your answers, not an AI model’s answers.

Video Application

In the video resume, we’re hoping to get to know you better as a person, including your motivations and interests. Questions to answer will be sent along to all applicants who make it to the second round. It doesn’t have to be high production value - a video using your webcam and computer microphone is more than enough! However, we recommend putting some effort into the content of the video and how you answer the question. We understand this process might not be accessible for all students. If you require an alternative method to make your submission, you can reach out to the GitHub Education team, and we’ll arrange some help.

After your video has been submitted, we’ll take up to 3 weeks to review them. If the program is the right fit for you, you’ll be accepted and receive an invitation to go through the GitHub Campus Experts Training and on the road to becoming an official Campus Expert!

What’s Next?

Join GitHub Education and subscribe to our education newsletter to stay up to date with all the latest GitHub Education news.

Are you ready to apply? Make sure you’re ready by getting the GitHub Student Developer Pack and subscribing for program updates. We look forward to hearing from you when applications open.

Apply Here

Pj's First Field Day: A Campus Experts Adventure

Pj Metz — Tue, 07 May 2024 23:55:23 +0000

I’m sitting in my hotel room after leaving an after party at Dave and Busters and I’m a little out of it. I feel like the last thing I remember is going up an elevator at the Microsoft office in Times Square to get to our event. Next thing I know, I'm in my hotel room 10 hours later, tired and inspired. I remember some flashes of laughter - deep discussions about AI and internships, Diversity in tech and organizing your first hackathon. Lots of discussion and noise, the kind that isn't abrasive but exciting — the noise of collaboration and community. Looking back, it all rushed by so quickly that I can barely recall it all.

That was Field Day?

Oh yeah, THAT was Field Day. And I can't believe I get to be part of this community, let alone find a way to help it's already amazing members grow and learn together.

Pj, you're now in charge of a global community of students who have already done so much without you, how do you feel?

What is Field Day?

Field day is an un-conference created by GitHub Campus Experts. It's designed to be a place for students to gather and talk with their peers about technology; web development, app development, AI, internships, tech stacks, best practices, and (somehow) much much more. After an intro, keynote, and ice breaker, attendees grab post it notes and write down what they want to talk about and stick it up on a board. Then, the organizers group those into similar topics and create small group areas where those topics will be discussed by whomever wants to join. Imagine a meetup where the topic is chosen by the people attending rather than the organizers.

Oh cool! But, What are Campus Experts?

Another great question! You're good at asking these questions, Pj!

Pj: You're amazing. Pj: Thank you, you're amazing. Pj: NO thank you, you're amazing. Pj: Of course, thank you, but you're...

Campus Experts are students around the world who want to build communities around tech. These students are organizing hackathons, meetups, workshops, social events, and study sessions. We hold applications twice a year (February and August) and receive thousands of people wanting to become a Campus Expert. GitHub's role in this is supporting only — helping them with swag, funding, logistical support, and being a kind of guide in how to organize these events.

Most importantly, they are not GitHub ambassadors. We work in GitHub of course (using issues, discussions, actions, etc etc.) but we don't expect the students to go around and tell everyone only about GitHub. We only want them to organize events and become a community leader on their campus to other students interested in technology.

Great! Annnnddd... Who are you?

Oh yeah! I guess I didn’t do that earlier. I’m Pj Metz, Program Manager of Education Communities at GitHub, and I'm responsible for the Campus Experts program. I recently joined the education team (February 6th to be exact), so I'm definitely still learning how the program works. I had an 11 year career as a high school English teacher before switching to tech in 2021. I’m excited to be coming back to something related to my first passion of education while still working in my new career in tech.

Okay, back to the story.

Since I started in February, I wasn’t very active in planning this event. In fact, as you can see above, this event is not planned by GitHub staff. We only play a supporting role in it. This means we didn’t pick the location, the venue, the food, the events, the speakers… none of it. It was all in the capable hands of our Campus Experts. Now, as I mentioned, I was a high school teacher for over a decade, and have helped my fair share of student groups to organize events, and it was nearly always chaos. We’d have a few students who were really doing most of the work and planning, but a lot of it felt like herding cats.

Pictured: Me trying to run a prom committee meeting in 2017

So I truly didn’t know what to expect coming into this. I was so used to having to help students understand basic event organization stuff before, and I had not helped with this one at all. On top of that, I had only met around 10 campus experts on zoom before this moment. I didn’t know them as professionals or students yet. So while I didn’t fear the worst…

There was much less fire in the worst case scenario I created in my head

...I certainly wasn’t sure how things would go.

Well, how did things go

This was one of the best organized small events I have ever attended. I was stunned at how well it all went and how few things went “wrong” like they usually do.

The purple umbrellas are a symbol of Field Days

Seamless transitions from activity to activity, quick thinking people proactively working to PREVENT issues from coming up before they happened, and a lively, excited, and all together fun environment seemed effortlessly generated by these students. I watched students lead discussions where they actively worked to not take over the discussion. They were moving between groups to encourage different points of view. They were working with the team at the venue to ensure they understood what was expected of them as guests, and they smiled the whole time. I witnessed so little stress compared to other events of similar size that I’ve been to.

As we wound down and our attendees started to head back home, arms full of stickers and umbrellas, I watched as the Campus Experts continued to work. Packing everything up, delegating roles to people as we cleaned, and in one particularly amazing instance, a Campus Expert contacted a local shelter to directly donate our leftover food and drinks to. It was a block away, and a team of nearly a dozen of us each carrying something walked there to make sure we weren’t wasting anything. This happened unprompted and was something they had already considered beforehand. I was proud to even be associated with these young folks.

Typing now after the event, I know exactly what it is that separated this event from others in my mind: they were PREPARED.

What does it mean to be prepared?

Preparation is thinking not only of what you want to happen and ensuring it can, it’s about considering what MIGHT happen and having a plan in place for it. We had plenty of food and drinks, activities ran on time, and attendees had ample opportunities to run the hallway track and chat with each other to build important connections and networks that will last throughout the rest of their careers. It was amazing to watch and I distinctly remember thinking, “This is FAR BETTER than it would have been if I had organized it.”

I was humbled by these Campus Experts dedication and hard work, and simultaneously immensely proud of what they had accomplished. This single Field Day, an event that I attended after working at GitHub for only 27 actual work days, was the perfect first GitHub education related event for me to attend.

The bar is now set far higher; not just for future Campus Expert events, but my bar is even higher now. Knowing what these students are doing out here is making me feel like I have to work even harder.

I can do it!

Admittedly, I’m more nervous about what I can do now that I've seen what these students are capable of; I need to work even harder than I originally thought. But, as many people who are attending Campus Expert led events around the world are finding out, there’s something inspiring about these students in red hoodies.

To learn more about Campus Experts: https://education.github.com/experts
To get your free Student Developer Pack: https://education.github.com/pack
To learn more about the organizers of Field Day North America 2024:
Joash Matthew
Kartik Patel
David Teather
Cecilia La Place
Javier Bracho
Leon Kipkoech
Vedant Bahel

Deployment for Twitter bots: 3 Alternatives to Traditional Cloud

Pj Metz — Sat, 27 Aug 2022 15:55:09 +0000

EDIT: As of 2023-02-09, Twitter's API is no longer Free. This article is no longer an effective way to learn coding or develop new skills. I am so sad because Twitter bots are one of the first ways I had fun writing code.

This article will stay up only because it's my first, and it marks an important part of my career change.

RIP Shania Bot.

So, you’ve got a bot, and you want it to run for longer than the time you run it in your terminal to make sure it works, but you’re not sure what to do. Do you deploy to AWS? GCP? Azure? Turn your laptop on and keep it running there forever and ever and ever and just never close your terminal?

Pictured: the family computer after I download "Goldfinger_Superman_real_version_mp3.exe" from Limewire

If those sound tricky, or like it might eat up your electric bill (or just your bills in general), then you’ve come to the right place! I’ve got three alternatives to traditional cloud providers to talk to you about: Render, Heroku, and Linode. These three services can give you a variety of options when it comes to where you want your code to run from and how you want it to be deployed.

NOTE: I am new to tech and programming, likely similar to you if you’re checking this article out. This article is more like “sharing what I’ve learned recently” than “expert giving you advice on how to deploy.” The only thing I can confidently say is that I have done all the things I’m telling you in this article, so at the very least, we’re in the same boat. So join me in discovering these providers and what they can do to help us run bots that post Super Nintendo music or Taking Back Sunday songs.

I Promise it won't be all references to the 90's in these gifs

Render

Render is the one I’m newest to, but I’m already loving the options I have to run code here. There’s an impressive amount of options for services they provide, but I’m most interested in Cron Jobs for my bots. Cron Jobs requires a credit card, HOWEVER I am pretty sure this will end up costing about 75 cents a month. If cost is an issue, there are free ways to run bots on Render, but this article is talking about a paid one (albeit a cheap one). Let’s talk about what we have here.

Cron Jobs

My bots are usually written such that they are always on and any functions that make them tweet at a certain time are written with a cron job or schedule package like node-schedule. In fact, my bots in Javascript are only possible with the node-schedule package. And I’m so new to Python that I haven’t found a great way to recreate that package correctly. Granted, I’ve been doing this work as a hobby, so I’m sure there’s a way to do it, but I only have so much time between all my super cool other hobbies, so we’ll just say I’m a bad programmer and move on.

See, told you. Sometimes my gifs are from the 80s!

This is why I was so excited to find a GUI interface on Render that makes Cron Jobs way easier than I ever thought they could be. AND it works out of the box with GitLab. So let’s talk about how to Cron Job your bot.

You can sign up for an account with a GitLab, Google, or GitHub account or with an email and password of your choice. I signed up using GitLab since I’ll be using GitLab repos to provide the code for these web services. After allowing Render to connect to your account, you’ll verify with an emailed link, and then it’s time to choose your service!

Select Cron Job and then connect it to a specific repo. You’ll probably be asked to connect to your GitLab account again and then you should see a list of projects available. Select the one with your bot in it. Let’s talk about these options you’re given on the next page.

First off, name your Cron Job. This will be so you can distinguish it from the other services you may have on Render. The same name as your repo will be ok. For the environment, I‘m selecting Python3 since that’s what my bots need in order to run. Select a region you prefer. I always pick one closest to me, but it’s not a huge decision. Select the branch that will run when your cron job fires; in my case main is the best choice. This dropdown is based on the branches you have in your connected repo. The next line is automagically filled in based on your environment selected. Since we picked Python3, pip install -r requirements.txt is filled in here. You know what this means, right?

Please say you know because I barely know what's going on almost every day

That means you need a requirements.txt file in your repo somewhere, and it needs to list the dependencies for your project. A good way of knowing what the dependencies are is to check what you imported at the beginning of your python file. For my bots, I need Tweepy, config, and Python-dotenv Requirements.txt looks like this for Divas, my Twitter Bot Collection.

tweepy
python-dotenv
config

After that comes the actual schedule for your cron job. This means you need to know how to format a cron job. This is the exact moment where I google “How to run a cron job command” so I can know what to say to you. I’ll be back soon.

*I promise I'll be back don't go anwyhere ʲᵘˢᵗ ˢᵗᵃʸ ᵗʰᵉʳᵉ *

Ok, after a quick google search and about 40 minutes of being distracted by Tik-Tok, here’s how to format cron expressions.

Cron expressions are a way of expressing a certain schedule of sorts. It is certainly more complicated than I’m going to make it here, but let’s talk about what you need to know. The expression consists of six to seven fields separated by white space that indicate the schedule. There are certain characters that represent different values for these fields and it’s important to know at least a few of them. Here’s an example of a cron expression that represents on Tuesdays at 12:47:15 pm UTC.

15 47 12 ? * TUE *

So, from this we can tell that the first number is seconds, the second number is minutes, the next is hours, but then we have a question mark. And an asterisk. The question mark is in the “day of month” or “date” field. A question mark means “no specific value” while the asterisk means “all possible values.” This is sort of like the difference between “doesn’t matter” and “every time.” So, that question mark means the day of the month isn’t important because two fields later we define the day to fire as “TUE” meaning Tuesday. The asterisk in the fifth field, the month field, means every month. And the final asterisk is the year field, and that too means every year. There are other special characters you can learn about here and for those of you who are like me and just want to be able to pick from a generator to make your cron expression, here you go!

So, now that you’re a cron expression expert like me, input when you want your job to fire in the next space on the form. NOTE: I noticed that the cron expression for Render is only five fields long. I’m not sure what it excludes, but I do know that when you input your expression, directly underneath it tells you in English when the run command will happen. That's super helpful, thanks Render!

The last thing you put in is the run command, which in my case is python3 bot_file.py. This runs the file as the main file and will execute whatever is in the file.

The final step is deciding which plan you’re going to need. This ranges from 512 MB of RAM for 0.016¢/min to 8GB for 0.405¢/min. For our bots, we only need the tiniest amount since it’s just running one Python file.

There is a button for advanced options, with options like environment variables or secret files. These are both great ways for us to keep our Twitter API keys hidden, so it’s suggested that you utilize these in order to keep your bots from getting hacked. Click the button at the bottom to create your cron job!
From here, you’ll be able to see your build, and once it succeeds you can test it with the Trigger Run button at the top right of the page. Note: Twitter API limits exact duplicates of tweets twice in a row in 24 hours, so if you test your bot twice in a row, you’ll get an error the second time.

Heroku

One great way to host your code is Heroku. Heroku is free until November 2022, and more information about student plans should be coming soon. You can set up an account here.

Heroku operates off of what they call Dynos. Each Dyno is like a place for your code to run the same way it does on your local machine. In order to do that, we're going to create a dyno, give it some instructions, and finally connect our code repository in GitLab to the Dyno on Heroku.

Let's go!

New Heroku app

Go ahead and create a new app in Heroku once you're logged in. Name it and turn it on! Something important to do here is add a procfile to your repo. These docs will help you do that, but really all you need to include is worker: npm startas a single line in a file called procfile. In the resources tab, you'll need to make sure worker not web is selected. Often this isn't there at first. When you have the procfile and deploy the first time, the option should show up and then you can turn off web and turn on worker. This stack overflow answer was helpful when I was figuring this out.

Once you've done so, there's some instructions on how to deploy. If you're using Github, you can connect your repo to this and make it so when your main branch is updated, the code pushes to Heroku! Another method is to use the CLI (command Line Interface) and manually deploy your code. You're going to follow the instructions provided by Heroku to deploy your code! First, you should add your keys as environment variables to Heroku.

Find the settings tab, and then click the "config vars" button. Just like you did in Render, you’ll add the key name and the value here. This way, your project has access to your keys and can post to the twitter account!

NOW, Heroku has your keys, your repository is up to date, and you are ready to go. The instructions provided by Heroku will tell you how to get started, but the page itself also has some CLI instructions. These are the instructions from the app page about how to deploy to heroku using the command line.

Install the Heroku CLI

Download and install the Heroku CLI.

Type the following into the command line once it's installed to log in and follow the prompts on screen.
$ heroku login

Existing Git repository

For existing repositories, simply add the heroku remote by entering the following into the command line inside the local repository folder.

$ heroku git:remote -a name-of-dyno

In your terminal when you're ready to push to heroku, type git push heroku main. If the remote is setup correctly, it should start a new version on heroku and deploy your code!

Advanced method

This article has more information for using GitLab CI/CD to automatically deploy your code to Heroku. It's exactly what I used when I set up my CI/CD for my bots, so I will just link to it here since it did a much better job than I could at explaining the process.

Linode

Linode is a great option, it essentially works like a virtual machine where you can run your code. It’s the expensive option here, but is still cheap at $5/month. The reason I like Linode is because of how similar it is to running on your local machine and the process for putting your files on Linode feels very straight foward once you have the right app.

After signing up for a Linode account, the home page will look like this.

Create a Linode, and pick Ubuntu’s most recent version (or your preferred version) from the first dropdown menu. Select the region closest to you and then choose Nanode, the smallest option. It’s only $5 a month and has more than enough space and RAM for your Twitter bot and any other projects you’d want on it. When it asks for an Ubuntu label, name it after your project. Create a root password and click create. Make sure to remember the root password as you’ll have to use it every time to get into the Linode.

Once it boots up it’s time to get inside and clean up a bit.

Installing, Updating, and Preparing for the bot.

Linode provides a LISH console to use to access your Linode. On the top right of the Linode homepage, you’ll see a link for “Launch LISH Console.”

Click that and you have access to the Ubuntu instance you just created. You can also SSH into it from any terminal using the SSH access text just below the LISH.

Once you’re in, you should run “apt update” to check for updates available, and then “apt dist-upgrade.” It's recommended to make a new username for Linux so you're not running everything through the root, but in this case, all you're doing is a Twitter bot, so it's not hugely important. If you'd like to do it the right way, you can run make a new user and give it admin rights by following this video.

If your code is on Github, you can use git to clone your file, or you can use the GUI interface of Filezilla to transfer your code to the Linux instance. Since this is a beginner tutorial, let’s use Filezilla to transfer our files.

Just a real fun time for all of us

Using Filezilla

Here's how Filezilla looks once you open it.

Inside Filezilla, you can see input fields for Host, Username, Password, and Port. Host is the IP Address for your nanode, username should be "root" or whatever username you set up earlier, and password is what you set at the beginning. Use “22” as the port number. Upon connecting, you’ll get a message saying the key is unknown. This is normal, but you should double-check that the IP Address is correct. If it is, check the box to remember your Linode on Filezilla.

Go to the directory where you’re keeping the files for your Twitter bot. You’ll need the .env, config.js, the package.json, package-lock.json, the node_modules folder, and the index file for your bot. My index file is called snes.js. The files I’m moving over are highlighted in the following picture.

Once you highlight the files you want to transfer, you can click and drag your files to the right where you can see your Linux machine's files. Once you’ve transferred the files, you can use the LISH console or any terminal with an SSH connection to run your bot the same way you would from a terminal in Visual Studio Code. Type "npm run develop" and your code will start up using the .env variables you set up earlier. This makes the bot run and it will continue running on the server as long as the server remains uninterrupted.

Thanks

There’s three great options for hosting bots! Let me know in the comments which one is your favorite or any other options you might have!

Meet the Tanukis: Hannah Sutor

Pj Metz — Wed, 20 Jul 2022 17:52:56 +0000

Meet the Tanukis is a stream about the amazing Team members at GitLab. Each episode focuses on a team member discussing issues in tech that are important to them. This episode features Hannah Sutor, Senior Product Manager of Auth.

Meet the Tanukis: Hailey Pobanz

Pj Metz — Fri, 06 May 2022 17:07:54 +0000

Meet the Tanukis is a stream about the amazing team members at GitLab. Each episode focuses on a team member discussing issues in tech that are important to them. This episode features Hailey Pobanz, Area Sales Manager - SMB EMEA!

Free licenses of GitLab for education!!
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/

Meet the Tanukis: Jessica Reeder

Pj Metz — Mon, 11 Apr 2022 18:49:34 +0000

Links

Jessica:
https://www.jessicareeder.com
https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/readmes/jessicareeder/
https://allremote.info

Free licenses of GitLab for education!!
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/

Meet the Tanukis: Wayne Haber

Pj Metz — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:39:48 +0000

Student's Guide to enabling CI/CD with GitLab.com SaaS

Pj Metz — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 21:43:02 +0000

Blockchain technology is set on changing the world; its most visible uses are currently NFTs and Cryptocurrency, two topics I do not entirely understand, except that they involve wacky looking monkeys and a digital currency with a name that sounds like a Dungeons and Dragons kingdom.

Lord Eneftee of Ethereal, or whatever

But this article is not about either of those topics, because clearly I don’t know much about them. Instead, this article is about why GitLab has had to implement some changes for users of GitLab’s free SaaS (GitLab hosted) tier and how you, a student user, can still get some awesome features. We’re here with some advice to help you participate in great open source projects and use CI/CD on The DevOps Platform for static websites, class projects, or whatever you’re into. So let’s get into it.

Crypto Mining Abuse

So, it turns out, a lot of CI/CD companies were having their services abused for mining crypto currency. People created free accounts and would run code that would utilize the computing power offered for CI/CD to instead mine for crypto. This, as it also turns out, is not a great way to use the free computing access from these companies. So, in response, several companies decided to change the way users create a free account. No more temporary email addresses eating up electricity to mint AntEaterCoin, or whatever new cute animal based coin is out there.

Is this a thing? I did literally no research on if there’s an anteater coin. If it’s not a thing I claim it for myself.

GitLab's response was to check if it’s a real human on the other side of that email by requiring a bank card of some kind, debit or credit, to verify the user. This card is never completely charged, there is just a $1 pending charge to it that disappears. This is only for verification purposes, we don’t store your card’s information and it is never charged again. And it’s only one part of our effort to keep our resources available only to those using them for their intended purposes. We're currently looking for feedback on this process, and you can use this google form to tell us more about how we can improve this process.

Ok, so what can I do?

You’re a student, I assume. At least, that’s who this article is intended for. So there’s a few options you have in order to get through this new requirement.

If you are in possession of a bank card, credit or debit, we encourage you to go ahead and verify. I know money can be tight and I remember counting down to the cent how much I had recently spent so I would know whether I was having ramen or take out for dinner that night. The dollar is an authorization charge and will never clear your bank account, but it will lower your *available * balance by one dollar, so we want you to be aware of that. Check with your bank to see how available vs actual balances work to know your situation completely.

If you cannot use a bank card, for whatever reason or choice, there are some other options so you can still use the CI/CD GitLab offers. One involves installing a runner on your local machine and setting your CI/CD to use that runner. The other is to help your school apply for a GitLab for Education license. Let’s talk about these two options.

My own runner

The runner is the tool that actually takes your .gitlab-ci.yml file and, uhhh, runs it.

Fun Fact: This movie was definitely about DevOps

Shared runners are runners that GitLab provides for SaaS users. Verified users, including those with GitLab for Open Source Program, GitLab for Education Program and other licenses, have access to these runners. However, you can install a runner directly on your machine and point your project to that runner in order to use CI/CD. This comes with the bonus of no restrictions on minutes, since you’re using your own machine’s power for the runner.

Our docs have an extensive and detailed set of instructions for installing runners on a variety of systems. There is also a section on registering your runners, an important step so your repository knows where and what to communicate with when it’s time to continuously integrate or deliver/deploy. There are also plenty of youtube videos and articles on the subject. I like this one from Valentin Despa. You can also always find help on the GitLab forum.

GitLab for Education

GitLab offers free Ultimate licenses with unlimited users, either SaaS or self-managed, for qualifying educational institutions as long as it's for the purposes of teaching, learning, or research. This program is always expanding, and currently serves over 1,000 institutions and has 1.25 million active seats. Several universities are already using GitLab in classrooms across the world, and your classroom could benefit from it as well. In order to obtain a GitLab for Education license, a full-time employee of the university needs to apply. After the application is verified, your university will have a number of seats that can be assigned to students and you’d be able to use part of the 50,000 CI minutes that comes with the license and would no longer need to enter a credit card. This is especially useful for institutions looking to prepare their students for working in the tech world, as GitLab is The DevOps Platform and is utilized throughout the industry.

If this interests you, encourage a professor, chair, or other instructor to apply for the GitLab for Education Program licenses. It costs zero dollars and is a great way to get you and your classmates involved in the DevOps world. Check out our landing page here to learn more or head directly to the join page so you can send it to your professors and help them help you. Need to convince your professor it’s worth it? Interested in seeing how other schools are using GitLab? Want to read a case study about a few schools that are absolutely crushing it? Well then have I got a few links for you!

Dublin City University is setting their students up for great success in the future and saving their professors tons of time on grading code.
Heriot Watt is leading the way in peer testing using GitLab.
University of Surrey has found a stable home for it’s 2,300 projects and 110,000 builds.

How do I know all this? Well, my name is Pj Metz and, coincidentally, I’m an Education Evangelist for GitLab. You can follow me on Twitter to see the newest education news out of GitLab and on Twitch where I stream a few times a month with shows highlighting people in tech (including students) and Team members from GitLab. If you’re interested in showing off what you’ve created on GitLab, fill out this form for an opportunity to be on our Student Spotlight Stream.

That's all for now. Stay connected with GitLab on Twitter to find out about all the amazing things we're doing in Education and beyond. Keep an eye out the 22nd of each month for our new releases, going on 122 months in a row without fail.

Thanks, and Go INSERT SPORTS TEAM OR UNIVERSITY NAME HERE!

Meet the Tanukis: John Coghlan

Pj Metz — Mon, 08 Nov 2021 16:39:29 +0000

Links:
Devrelcon 2021

Free Licenses for Education/Research Institutions!

Meet The Tanukis: Michael Friedrich

Pj Metz — Thu, 16 Sep 2021 13:24:05 +0000

Links:
Everyone can Contribute Cafe!
Michael's presentation at 55:04
Michael's OSS journey
GitPod

Free Licenses for Education/Research Institutions!

Meet the Tanukis: Christos Bacharakis

Pj Metz — Wed, 15 Sep 2021 18:50:29 +0000

Links:
Hackathon!
Contribute to GitLab

Free Licenses for Education/Research Institutions!

Meet the Tanukis: Jamie Rachel

Pj Metz — Wed, 01 Sep 2021 19:34:33 +0000

Links:
Jamie's LinkedIn
Upcoming GitLab Meetups

Contribute to GitLab!