CodeScene joins the GitHub Student Developer Pack

We’re pleased to announce that CodeScene is included in the GitHub Student Developer Pack. 

This means that CodeScene is available for free to every student developer.

With a free CodeScene account, students get access to a powerful visualization tool that provides feedback on their code and how it evolves. CodeScene’s technical debt analyses also help students gain experience and awareness of how codebases evolve, which is knowledge that will give the students a head start in their careers.

CodeScene puts technical metrics into a business context and visualizes what the codebase looks like.

CodeScene for Students

At Empear, we have always supported students, academia, and research projects. Not only are we part of an international research project ourselves, we have also supported several student projects over the years.

Often, we have been contacted by universities that use my book, Software Design X-Rays: Fix Technical Debt with Behavioral Code Analysis, as course literature and provided the CodeScene tool for free to them. Until now, this has been an informal process. Our partnership with GitHub Student Developer Pack formalises our offer, and help more students and university programs benefit from CodeScene.

The Power of Visualizing Software Systems

One of the major challenges with software systems is that they are largely opaque and lack visibility; there are no physics for software. We cannot pull out a sub-system, turn it around, and inspect it. This lack of visibility is part of what makes on-boarding and re-work so expensive and time consuming. CodeScene offers a remedy via its powerful visualizations.

CodeScene in action: within minutes, the analyses let you b

Build a mental model of a previously unfamiliar codebase.

CodeScene identifies patterns in how developers interact with the codebase they are building. To students, this offers valuable feedback loops that help them evolve mental models of the codebase they’re working on. All information is presented as a set of interactive visualizations that let you zoom in and out to the level of detail you are interested in.

Later, on larger industry projects, the same set of techniques will prove invaluable as a fast-track on-boarding process; within minutes, you will know where the critical parts of any system are, as well as identifying the main developers that you might want to talk to in order to discover more.

The level of insights and the speed with which we get this information continues to fascinate me, and with our GitHub Student Developer Pack offer, we aim to put the same power into any student’s hands.

Raising Awareness of Technical Debt

Code quality issues and significant technical debt is hard and expensive to act upon. As a consequence, we frequently noticed that once a module has declined in code health it tends to stay that way; the cost to restore its health will always compete with more pressing immediate concerns, quite often the drive for new features.

The Docker hotspot daemon.go has accumulated complexity over the past years.

As a student, you can get a head start by using CodeScene’s technical debt analyses to get early warnings on code that decline in health. You might even explore how to predict future code quality issues before they happen. That way, you will learn when to invest in pro-active refactorings while they are still affordable. That knowledge will prove valuable on larger projects by letting you avoid preventable future maintenance headaches. Your future employees and colleagues will love that.

Sign-Up for CodeScene via the GitHub Student Developer Pack

Students who wish to use CodeScene on their private projects can sign up for a free account. Note that you need to be registered as a verified student at GitHub.

Not a student? No problem – CodeScene is available for free for open source projects too, and it’s paid plans make CodeScene available for private projects as well. Check out our plans or read more about CodeScene’s business cases.