In this bootcamp, you’ll work with many sets of credentials—for your CNM e-mail, for learn.cnm.edu, for Slack, for the hosting service where you’ll set up your own site, for GitHub, etc. Those credentials, and the resulting access, will typically be secured with passwords or passphrases.

Simply put, we’ll be working with too many sets of credentials for us to manage them on an ad hoc basis. Further, your instructors cannot be responsible for helping you remember your passwords. Finally, the instructors will not, as a rule, be able to interrupt instruction to wait for or assist a student who finds themselves unable to log in to one or more of their accounts in the middle of the class.

Given the above, we expect all bootcamp participants to install and use a password manager package. We are not dictating each student’s selection, but each student must use one. Note: The password manager features of current browsers are not sufficient for this purpose: they do not provide cross-browser sharing of credentials; more importantly, they do not include comprehensive features for saving and managing credentials that are not entered into a web page (e.g. SSH key passphrases and credentials for remote SSH or FTP/SFTP hosts).

A recent surveys of available products may come in handy for our students: “Best password manager to use for 2021” (c|net, December 11, 2021).