BitBucket, my love
I am currently taking CS246: Object Oriented Software Design at the University of Waterloo. I will post about my awesome rogue-like game final project which lead me to this discovery later; right now I want to praise BitBucket. It is the best source code hosting website for students. Read on to find out why.
Now, it’s time for a short story. My partner David and I had decided right away to use the popular Git version control system to keep track of our project. The problem we faced right away was that the source code hosting website I had been using for my personal project previously, Github, does not (in my knowledge) offer any free and private source code hosting. In the case of our school project, considering plagiarism and future offerings of CS246 which might have this same project, we needed to use a private repository.
This leads to my discovery of BitBucket; I remember doing a quick Google search or something for other online Git source code hosting services. I navigated to the BitBucket website. Each plan is based, from what I can tell on their pricing page, entirely on the number of collaborators which are given. I found that they offered a half-decent free plan which allowed for 5 collaborators. I was satisfied with this, because the project I wanted to host would only have David and myself working on it, so it would be sufficient.
I signed up with my uwaterloo email address. This is important. Do you know why it is important? Because BitBucket offers it’s best plan, with unlimited collaborators and is regularly $100/month, free to those who sign up with an email address from an academic institution which has been registered with BitBucket.
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt such a nice surprise from an internet service before. Can you even imagine? “Cool! 5 collaborators on private repositories. I guess I’ll sign up… Oh? You’re going to give me your unlimited, $100/month plan for free because I’m a student?”
This is not an advertisement to get referrals so I can get 1 extra collaborator for my free BitBucket account. Do you know why? Because BitBucket has given me an unlimited collaborator, unlimited private repository, regularly $100/month plan for free because I`m a university student. There is literally nothing left for me to gain.
Go sign up. Not because I want you to, but because you know you want to.
This is a link to the blog post announcing the academic license