Applications after your cohort is over

Slack

Slack costs about $10 a month per student. It’s also wasn’t really architected for how we use it, so we have to pay for a Derek and Ivy in like 8 Slacks! And many of you are in muliple Slacks and cross-team situations. Even with their new cross-workspace tools, it’s not ideal. It’s totally worth the money. Just one good conversation or code review pays for the whole month in value. It’s not perfect, but it’s done a great job for us, and we thank it.

Our dream was always to have a shared community of all of the Alumni. This way, we’d all know for sure that each of us shared that same foundation. There wouldn’t be any people saying “Why doesn’t my box go to the left” or “How do I make website?” or “Sup hlp plz.” And we want that place to be somewhere that has video and screen-sharing and promotes pair programming. This way – when anyone is having a tough time at their new job, they can hop on with some other alumni and get real-time help with real-life work. And we can all explore higher-resolution topics together with reasonable expectations of the technical baseline.

But there’s no single platform that checks all of the boxes for us. And certainly not a free one. So, until we build one ourselves, we have to make a choice. We’d prefer to stay in Slack, but (as you know) – everyone is really, really cheap and wouldn’t actually pay $9 a month (even if they got thousands of dollars of help for free each month) because our collective sense of value is extremely skewed right now. One day, people will see the value of it. But we’re not going to pay for everyone else’s Slack after your cohort is over. And we can’t trust you to pay for it either (and Slack won’t even let you pay for it) – So, you’d have to pay us and then we’d have to pay for it – and we don’t want that type of relationship with you. So, until we come up with a better situation – we’ll have an Alumni Discord server instead. Depending on your situation, you’ll get the info about that when it is time.

If you want to write “Sup, help” – there are tons of language and framework-specific discords for that. 😉

Git Tower

They were nice enough to give us free licenses for everyone, but at some point, the new students need those license seats. So, you’ll have to either pay for it yourself – or use Terminal or another Git Client. GitHub has a free GUI, but it is much more limited compared to Tower. There are also tools that allow you to deal with Git things right in your text editor via Sublime of VSCode etc., and there are other GUIs like Tower you can find in a quick web search. Find an extra great one? Tell us about it!

You can find them. But at some point (we’ll wait as long as we can) – your Tower license isn’t going to work anymore.

DeployBot

At some point in the course – you might have hooked up DeployBot to automatically deploy your code via FTP to the pe-projects server (when your GitHub repo received a push). Maybe you didn’t, and we phased it out.

But DeployBot isn’t really built to be deploying 50+ students’ work on one account. So, at some point – you’re going to have to set something up for yourself. And really – we’ll probably have everyone start with something on their own like this from now on. Here’s one option https://buddy.works which looks free for 1 website. Give that a shot. And depending on your situation, you might be using Netlify or Railway or Spinup and by the time you’re reading this – you should have a solid plan on how your DNS and domain name and hosting and deployment are all to be working. (if they aren’t already in place!

The pe-projects server

This thing is paid for already – and is very cheap to stuff hundreds of students on.

However, you should get your own hosting and your own website! Plan on this thing just disappearing one day. Another student might delete it by accident. We always left it insecure and open to trouble in the hopes we’d find some weird situations to talk about.

If you’re a real designer or web developer, then you should have your own domain and hosting setup. We would recommend that you team up with some other students and host your LAMP type projects on a shared server via SpinupWP – or if you aren’t using PHP or server-side things that require that stack, then you can use Surge or Netlify or whatever static/javascript type hosting platforms you want.

And feel free to use the peprojects server how you want – but just make sure you ask yourself “why don’t I have my own server? Is it because I don’t know how to set it up? Or is it too expensive? Or am I just lazy?” If you’re lazy or confused about how to do it – then that will help answer why you don’t have enough money to pay for it. 😉