Meet GitLab's New Education Evangelist: How to get Free License for your classroom

I love telling people what my job is. Mostly because I get to monopolize the conversation for the next fifteen minutes explaining what it is and everyone looks at me and they focus on me and all that attention makes me feel so LOVED.

Me too, Rachel Berry.

My job, my new job, might I add, is Education Evangelist at GitLab. And the long and short of what I do is that I get involved in communities and show them what GitLab is capable of doing for them. My community is education. And what can GitLab do for them? Well, since you're here...

I CAN SHOW YOU THE GIIIIIT. SHINING, SHIMMERING, BRAAAAAANCHES.

FIRST, a bit about me

"Kids don't care what you know until they know that you care," was a phrase I used to justify my teaching style over the past 11 years. I shared lots of personal information, gave my opinion on whatever the students were asking me, and generally treated them like humans with emotions, thoughts, and a life outside my classroom. I believed kids should know I cared about them as people first, then they would care to learn from me. I'm bringing that same energy to my new career; I have desire to connect with you as a person and not as a "job." I like meeting people, I like sharing about what I'm doing, and I love the ways community allows us to flourish and grow.

I'm Pj Metz, a former educator turned DevRel. I started learning to code in May 2020 when my friend Brandon Minnick suggested I might be good at it. Well, not coding exactly, but at a job like his. He's a Developer Advocate at Microsoft, and he's smart as hell and even handsomer. Here's a picture.

Told you so. Handsome.

So he tells me to give programming a shot, and I was burnt out from teaching English which involved assigning papers and then complaining that I had too many papers to grade. "Why not assign less papers, then?" you might be asking, completely ignoring the point of teaching English and literature to high schoolers. Well, It's underpaid and stressful, so I decided to spend the next school year working full time teaching AP Language and Composition and teaching myself to code at the same time.

Fast forward.

We’re skipping a lot of cool stuff to get to the important stuff

Now I'm here at GitLab, and I'm ecstatic to be able to combine over a decade of experience in education with a new-found love of tech and programming to spread the word about GitLab, the complete DevOps solution in a single app.

Dang, I already got the Elevator pitch down, too!

Just CRUSHING IT.

So what's the point?

Here's the point, GitLab is an open devops platform supporting the entire devops lifecycle. Our app, GitLab, aims to assist in creating a collaborative environment in which teams can work together more seamlessly in order to decrease friction and increase productivity. Companies like Siemens, GoldmanSachs, Fanatic, and Ticketmaster use GitLab with new companies joining as customers all the time.

GitLab has a list of core values we operate by: Collaboration, Results, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion and Belonging, and Transparency. and we use these values in all of our decision making. Community is important to us, and as an Open Core company we belive in getting as many people involved as possible. We believe that having an all in one devops solution is important, and it should be available for everyone, from first time developers to staff level engineers to designers to, well, everybody. We've had a free version of GitLab since the beginning, but as we look to the next generation of developers, we want them to have experience that will benefit them in the workplace while simultaneously fostering environments to help innovation and thought leaders of tomorrow.

To that end, GitLab offers qualifying institutions the ultimate tier of our product for free.

Free. No cost. Self managed or SaaS. Free.

And unlike Knope in this gif, there’s no hangover the next day

Now, let's talk about what that looks like.

Free ninety nine.

So, there's rules. Of course.

I hope you weren’t already trying to find a way to break the rules…

The deciding factor in a free license is how you use it. If you want to use it for instructional use (like in a classroom so your students can use GitLab as a tool in creating their projects) then that's totally fine. If you want to use it at your educational institution for research purposes, that's great, too! Both of those cases are free. However, we cannot give a license to an educational institution to be used by their IT or tech department or campus wide. That would require purchase.

Since GitLab is used primarily by people looking for a place to keep their source control and CI/CD, you'd think that a Computer Science or Engineering classroom is the only place this would be applicable. But GitLab is more than that, and we believe that the DevOps cycle can be applied to a variety of creative endeavors. The entire GitLab company, from marketing to finance to design and tech writers use GitLab to work together towards greatness using the tools of GitLab itself. It's not just about GitLab in the CS lecture halls, it can be used in fashion design, or literature, or even anthropology. We've even had a meetup specifically about how our own team members use GitLab beyond code called, well, "Beyond Code"

Anywhere teams or groups need to collaborate, we can be there to help drive that collaboration more seamlessly. You can read more about how educational institutions in 75+ countries are using GitLab in our 2020 GitLab for Education Surer Report.

Why this article?

I'm so glad you asked.

Or, rather, I'm glad I framed it as if you're asking and used that to create a clever transition to the next part of my article.

Anyway...

We're looking to spread the word! And therefore, without further ado, here's the call to action!

Picard says you GOTTA

Dear Higher Education and all connected stakeholders, we have a few ways to get involved with GitLab:

1. Join the Education Program. If you’re a faculty, or staff member you can join at this link and request some FREE licenses for Educational or Research use. If you’re a student, you can get your professors, TAs, or staff you work with involved with this link.
2. If you’re a student, check out our free tier of GitLab available for your personal projects. It’s free forever with the free tier, and includes everything you need to get started.
3. We have a Student Spotlight program specifically for highlighting students who are using GitLab and deserve recognition for what they’re creating or how they’re using GitLab to create it.
4. Want to meet us and help further GitLab’s mission? We’d love that! We believe that everyone can contribute, and have a GitLab Heroes program for people who are going above and beyond in their contributions. We also host meetups and chats about a variety of topics where DevOps experts will talk with you about projects, ideas, and innovations. Come see us in a variety of places!

Most of all, if you know someone who would benefit from this information, send this article to them! We're looking to expand our reach and get every student and classroom access to some amazing technology.

Finally, you can follow me on Twitter at @MetzinAround to always see whats going on with GitLab and education. There's also the official GitLab account to follow for updates related to all things GitLab. Thank you, and see you out there!