A Student Planner That Outgrew Its Campus
The GitHub Student Developer Pack has been supporting student projects for six years, bundling more than a hundred premium tools and services. When the call went out for #NewYearNewPack submissions, students responded with a wide range of work: event sites, productivity tools, finance tracking APIs, and even projects that grew into commercial products. Some Pack partners took notice of the entries and publicly endorsed the students' work.
Managing the Chaotic Semester
One submission that rose to the top came from Frank Matranga, a sophomore at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His project, LATE, is an open-source planning and coordination tool built specifically for students at his college. Frustration with juggling schoolwork had been building since high school, and once Matranga arrived at Rensselaer he found the chance to act on it. Together with a student team assembled through the school's open source community, he turned LATE into a campus-wide hit: 87 students are already testing it, and more than six hundred are on the waitlist.
The infrastructure behind LATE would normally be a costly hurdle for a college student. Instead, the Pack covered the essentials:
- Hosting the entire application on Heroku
- User emails and advertising via SendGrid
- Error tracking with Sentry
As Matranga put it, the Pack not only showed him what kinds of tools were available but made the whole setup feasible. "Finding the right tools to develop, maintain, and host such a project would normally be difficult and very pricey, especially for a college student."
Ramping Up Fast
Tight academic schedules leave little room for onboarding. Matranga's team handled this by learning each tool as they integrated it, using school breaks to dig deep into documentation for whatever new service they wanted to adopt. Fortunately, the Pack's offerings came with well-written docs and tutorials. "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."
Unexpected Career Turns
LATE's success has had a ripple effect beyond the campus calendar. Matranga says the project reshaped his professional ambitions: "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."
Matranga is one of the #NewYearNewPack winners. The full gallery is worth a look for any student wondering what the Pack can enable, and students with similar projects can share their own builds via Twitter.
