7 years ago, I took a computer networking class in college, and it came with $100 in AWS credit. This class, and those credits, were some of the most career-imp

7 years ago, I took a computer networking class in college, and it came with $100 in AWS credit. This class, and those credits, were some of the most career-impacting things that I took away from my 4 years. Here's why. As a poor, unemployed student, $100 was a lot of money. Even once I had a nice job, I wasn't used to paying for services beyond very basic web hosting, and probably wouldn't have put any thought or energy into learning how to deploy and run things in the cloud. The opportunity cost was simply higher than I was used to. BUT, because I had that $100, and because the networking class had given me a basic understanding AWS's offerings, I kept using AWS once I graduated. Because, why not? For small projects (hosted free on Heroku), $100 can go a LONG way (spent mostly on S3), and I was able to fund my side projects for about 2 years. Side projects that led to my current job as a full-stack Rails developer. It wasn't about the actual value of that class or the AWS credits. (Looking back, $100 was dirt cheap compared to my tuition costs.) It was about the activation energy required to get a clueless student programmer familiar with the cloud and understanding what kinds of problems can be solved.