Getting to know the #NewYearNewPack winners

The GitHub Student Developer Pack has been around for six years and changed tremendously in that time. The Pack now holds over a hundred premium tools and services, making the possibilities endless for student developers, designers, and hackers across the world.

This new year we asked you to share your Pack creations with #NewYearNewPack, and the results were more than we could’ve imagined. You created outstanding pieces of work, enhanced and mobilized by the tools from the Pack. We saw event sites, productivity tools, finance tracking APIs, and projects that later evolved into living products.

Some partners from the Pack even vouched for your work!

But one project really stood out to us, and we wanted to know a little more.

Turning work in LATE

Meet Frank Matranga. He’s a sophomore at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and has been working on LATE, an open-source planning and coordinating tool for students at his college. Frank wanted to ease the pain of managing school work since high school, and he finally had the opportunity to make this a reality when he started at Rensselaer. With the help of the school’s open source community, Frank crafted a team of students to work on LATE. Now with 87 students testing and over six hundred on the waitlist, LATE is a campus sensation.

“Finding the right tools to develop, maintain, and host such a project would normally be difficult and very pricey, especially for a college student.” Rensselaer’s open source community was a tremendous help in development, but the tools from the Pack helped get LATE started. “The Pack not only highlighted what sort of tools were available to me, but allowed me to host the entire application (via Heroku), send emails to users and send advertisements (via SendGrid), track errors effectively (via Sentry), and more!”

Getting started

Learning how to use so many new tools and services can be a daunting task, especially as a student. “Due to my lack of much free time each semester, my team and I had to learn our tools as we went. School breaks are usually a time where we focus on scouring the documentation of a new tool we might want to use.” Luckily for Frank, the tools in the Pack had him covered. “Many of the products offered in the Pack have amazing documentation, tutorials, and guides for new users that made the process much easier than it could’ve been.”

Learning and growing

What started as an idea in high school changed Frank’s outlook on the future. “It’s not an exaggeration to say that this project totally changed the trajectory of my college career, and made me reevaluate what I wanted to do afterward. From childhood, I wanted to be a computer programmer, but the experience I got from running this project and its team exposed me to project management and the real impact I could have in such a position.”

Congratulations Frank Matranga on becoming one of our #NewYearNewPack winners!

Thanks for participating

We loved seeing what you could create using the Pack, and we can’t wait to see more from you in the future. Check out the fantastic projects made by the #NewYearNewPack winners.

Do you have a project that should be in the gallery? Tweet us a link to your project and GitHub repository.

Get started with the Pack

Written by

Mei'lani Eyre

@MeyAyre