Maybe you’re a student developer looking to improve your coding skills or maybe you’re a student or someone who has a blog and wants to make some money. In either case, you might be aware that most of the available software packages are heavily priced. This is because they are targeted at the professionals who have the budget to purchase their services. In this article, I am going to show you some top free software which can be helpful for every non-professional developer out there.
If you’re a student developer, you know how expensive tools for coding can be. Here are the best tools that will help you develop your way to stardom without breaking your wallet.
GitKraken Git GUI
Learning Git as a student can set you apart from your classmates and will make you more attractive to prospective employers.
Get GitKraken Pro Suite free through the GitHub Student Developer Pack!
Learning the fundamentals of Git, a robust and complex version control system (VCS), as a student will enable you to quickly jump in and collaborate with future colleagues when you join your first development team.
Something notoriously difficult about learning Git is visualizing what’s happening under the hood, as the command line interface can be extremely cryptic. GitKraken’s UI is the best on the market, offering a great deal of visibility into all aspects of your project, including branches and commits.
See how how different commit history looks in GitKraken vs the command line in this article: The GitKraken Git GUI vs the CLI.
I recommend GitKraken to my students because the visual representation of the change history helps them understand the complex branching and forking features of Git. GitKraken also makes it easy to accomplish common tasks.
– Justin Hunt, teacher at Georgian College in Ontario, Canada
GitKraken makes it so much easier to see what’s visually happening; I absolutely love the UI.
– Dan, full stack development student at Helios Training
The best part?! Students can get GitKraken Pro Suite for free through the GitHub Student Developer pack, which includes our in-app code editor, allowing you to create and edit files directly in GitKraken. The GitKraken Pro Suite also includes Pro licenses of GitKraken Boards and GitKraken Timelines.
Visual Studio Code Editor
Some of the elements developers love about GitKraken are also present in Visual Studio Code, a code editor by Microsoft. Offering an intuitive UI with a prominent sidebar, powerful defaults, discoverable extensions, and more, VS Code provides a simple and clean code editing platform for student developers.
Visual Studio Code comes fairly complete out of the box, but there are many plugins available to extend its functionality.
– Slant.com
VS Code users appreciate the ability to organize files by folder or project; there is also smart editing for built-in languages like JavaScript and Typescript, which can come in handy for students who are constantly being introduced to new coding languages.
Visual Studio Code is an ideal editor for beginners. What I like most is that it’s easy to use, stable and powerful. It’s easy to order the code lines or labels, and I like the search of files because it’s intuitive and fast.
– Cristian, G2Crowd
GitKraken Boards
Offering integrations with the top two tools, GitKraken Boards provides a platform to track tasks and issues across projects. Task management is often not a prioritized skill for students, despite the fact that it can make or break you in the workplace. Taking the time to practice issue tracking and time management now will serve you well in the years to come, and will set you apart from the pack.
Use GitKraken Boards to track your issues, and then manage those issues directly from the GitKraken Git GUI through the seamless issue tracking integration. Plus, students can connect GitKraken Boards to GitHub to set up workflow automations, link cards to pull requests, and sync with GitHub Issues and GitHub Milestones to see your changes reflected across both systems.
GitKraken Boards has helped me and my classmates easily set and meet deadlines for our CS projects and collaborate better.
– Gatare Libère, student at Kabarak University in Nakuru, Kenya
GitKraken Boards makes it easy to collaborate with teammates and see what action items need to get done. Students can assign tasks to other team members and track those tasks to completion. You can even create and share public boards with classmates who don’t have a GitKraken account—all you need is a URL!
Better yet, GitKraken Boards can be accessed via a mobile app, making it convenient to organize to-do items for all your classes, and even personal projects or inspiration boards, while at your computer or on the go. This incredible tool is free for all!
You can leverage GitKraken Boards to have a personal Kanban board for all your studies. It doesn’t need to be bound to specific software projects.
– Kevin Wittek, teacher at the Institute for Internet Security in NRW, Germany
Visual Studio Code: Best Free Code Editor for Windows
Free
Visual Studio Code is to Windows what Sublime Text is to macOS. Use it to intuitively write and edit HTML and CSS code. You can also use it to build a Bootstrap website. Visual Studio Code gives you access to a wealth of extensions to expand the functionality of the tool. For instance, you can download GitLive to collaborate with other developers and designers.
Visual Studio Code Core Functionalities
- Coding
- Text Editing
MySQL – One of the world’s most popular open-source databases
Pricing: Basic – free, Pro service is available to buy
Editorial ratings: ★★★★★
Developed by MySQL AB of Sweden and currently owned by Oracle, MySQL is one of the most popular relational database management systems today. It’s the best free and open source Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) for web applications.
Main features:
- Excellent performance andin stable service.
- Open source code with no copyright restrictions.
- Easily installation and maintainance due to the small download size.
- Various operating systems, APIs, and development languages supported.
Conclusion
As a student developer, it is crucial to become familiar with all the resources available to you. You don’t necessarily have endless amounts of money for software or even time to be spending hours online looking for that perfect program that will help you in your future career (sounds boring I know).