This is one of those important events in life where you realise that sometimes those who hold seniority over you aren't necessarily as smart as you are. This experience will help you to cultivate a healthy disrespect for authority. We all go through something like this at some point.
The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?
Perhaps you could even get GitHub to sponsor it :)
Hey kids (and everyone else) if you're even remotely familiar with tech and you don't stay completely siloed in one space - very extremely frequently you will encounter people "above you" in the chain who are comparatively complete idiots re tech.
You will have to think carefully about how to proceed when you discover this, it's going to be a constant and consistent question of -- "at this stage, is it worth it for me to press this?"
I like this approach and is one reason I’m cynical about organizations that run these types of events where the staff have no practical knowledge. There’s an industry of consultants who run challenges and hackathons and I’ve been surprised when organizations spend $100k on consultants to give our $1k in prizes or something.
The fact that this challenge doesn’t have a decision maker who knows that GitHub can host as well as template sites and differentiate between the two is a good sign of incompetence.
It’s so cool that kids are doing these challenges and I wish they didn’t have to get cynical and review the challenge before participating. One thing I look for is who is on the review committee or board. If it’s people with good backgrounds, that’s a good sign. If it’s faceless or people with no background in the topic, then I advise avoiding.
> There’s an industry of consultants who run challenges and hackathons and I’ve been surprised when organizations spend $100k on consultants to give our $1k in prizes or something.
Ah yes the "Thanks for the record breaking quarter everyone, enjoy these 4 $5 Hot n Ready pizzas and two bottles of Coke" event.
That is a super good idea, some of our posts have taken off and we have even been contacted by the vp of developer relations for github. I'll contact the rest of the group and see what they think. Although, I do happen to know that fbla has a similar type contest to TSA so we might just move to that next year.
>> The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?
Reading the replies to this comment saying "rules are rules" is honestly heart breaking. Where has the real spirit of innovation gone? The hacker ethics [0]?
> Although, I do happen to know that fbla has a similar type contest to TSA so we might just move to that next year.
It's your decision, but I say build your own. You've built an audience, already have outreach into the community and a good story.
> Reading the replies to this comment saying "rules are rules" is honestly heart breaking
Yeah that was sad to see :(
I like the attitude that if you don't like the rules, go and make your own thing where you can choose your own rules and not be constrained by those of other people. That's basically the origin story for a lot of successful entrepreneurs.
Maybe the lesson is just that competitions tends to have arbitrary rules and limitations. If you think the rules are stupid, don't participate in the competition.
The rule in question bans template generators. Their teacher didn’t understand that just because you can technically copy a template off of GitHub doesn’t mean that is the only thing GitHub is for.
She then points out this rule in the Official Rulebook:
I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted.
You only use the template engine if you go through github.io or if you look at .md files in the UI.
So you are not even «technically» using the template engine part of Github.
However root commenters sentiment is still very valid, the sooner you realize how many people who are not particularly smart also work in this business the sooner :D
Developers are starting to become a pretty decent average representation of the population the later years after all.
~~Technically is still processed via Jekyll. To bypass Jekyll you need to add `.nojekyll` on root. Something the authors found out themselves after someone on reddit told them about it. (Not that it would change anything.)~~
edit: On second thought that's probably wrong.
>They did not use the template engine functionality.
Regardless the rule was clear. "No Github." Yes, it's bullshit*. But this should be argued before making the submission.
*Rule also includes Replit. What's even funnier? "Frameworks, such as Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress" are allowed. So using a template engine is bad but using a CMS is fine.
> The rule didn't say some parts of Github was okay, the rule said Github was not allowed.
The rule is clearly written with the mistaken belief that GitHub is a templating engine. The person that judged their submission also confirmed their misunderstanding.
I'm not sure what type of competitions you've been a part of, but I have seen several where the rules are changed or re-interpreted on the fly because someone pointed out an error in the instructions or rules.
> I'm not sure what type of competitions you've been a part of, but I have seen several where the rules are changed or re-interpreted on the fly because someone pointed out an error in the instructions or rules.
Yeah, and if they pointed it out before the competition ended, that would count as "on the fly".
Flagging it as erroneous, ambiguous or similar after you are disqualified for breaking it is something I've never seen before, and I guess neither have you.
> Yeah, and if they pointed it out before the competition ended, that would count as "on the fly".
"On the fly" includes after initial disqualification or final results. In some cases it is not possible or desirable to change the winners, but the competition organizers nevertheless admitted the fault and did their best to compensate the team. The organizers of this competition seemingly have done nothing.
The medium post states they submitted their website on the weekend and received no notification that they were disqualified until they reached out to the regional coordinator. At that point, several days had already gone by and the judging was completed. How do you propose they should have handled the situation when they had no idea they were disqualified until after the competition ended?
> > Flagging it as erroneous, ambiguous or similar after you are disqualified for breaking it is something I've never seen before, and I guess neither have you.
I went to an all-day CTF where a team retroactively went from last place to third or second place because the organizers realized the team approached the challenge in a way that wasn't technically allowed but followed the spirit of the competition. The team was promptly notified of the initial judges decisions and had an opportunity to state their case, which was deliberated amongst the staff and accepted.
These high school students, who spent months working on this project, were not given the same opportunity.
Smartness has nothing to do with project requirements. If the requirements say "no Github", you don't use Github. It's really that simple.
The rules don't specify "github.io" or "load .md files", it broadly specifies "Github" the website "that generate[s] HTML from text" in no uncertain terms. If you then proceed to use Github, it's only fair you are disqualified.
No, in fact the rules specify a "Github" among others as examples of "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files" that you are "NOT permitted" (their emphasis) to use.
Translating that into practical terms, it means "no Github", and also "no Jekyll" and all the other examples named and not named.
The Internet also allows such behavior so really it shouldn't have been allowed to use the Internet either.
A reasonable person would realize the key part is "Template engine" and would think they are okay as long as they avoid those. They did avoid that, and still got disqualified. That is why it isn't reasonable
And such a person after being disqualified should learn their lesson to read and understand the rules thoroughly.
The rule in question even distinguishes between "Template engine websites" and "sites that generate HTML"; if you refuse to read beyond the first comma you are being disingenuous let alone being ignorant.
As an aside, "the internet" doesn't automagically generate HTML for you. Unless I missed a memo and we can just get HTML by sticking a cable into the wall. :V
> The rules don't specify "github.io" or "load .md files", it broadly specifies "Github" the website "that generate[s] HTML from text" in no uncertain terms.
And that's just not true; the no-GitHub-whatsoever interpretation that you're pushing simply can't be described as "no[t] uncertain". In fact, I'd wager that a polling would reveal that most folks in a position to interpret the rules would come away quite certain that it isn't forbidden to use GitHub qua code host.
GitHub qua "template engine website" is "NOT permitted". That's certain.
GitHub qua code host? Not only is that, in fact, not stated "in no uncertain terms", but insisting that it's both forbidden and that it's clear that it's forbidden comes across as trying to will your way to truth.
You are not permitted to use sites that generate HTML, period. Even if you use a "site that generates HTML" like Github only as a file repository, that is still against the rule.
Your argument would be fair if the rule read like "using sites, such as Github, to generate HTML are not permitted", but that is not what the rule says.
I am not quibbling about whether the no-GitHub-whatsoever interpretation is an unreasonable interpretation of what's in the rules. I am specifically raising the issue of the hyperbolic and inappropriate use of the phrase "in no uncertain terms" in what you wrote.
Following the rules didn't help them. The rule was no templating tools that generate code. They didn't use that.
It simply seems like they had to deal with a school official who was too dumb to know what GitHub was and too egotistical to admit they might be wrong.
I actually dealt with something similar back in my high school days. I self-taught myself to program starting around age 10 or so. So by the time I was offered and took a "computer class" that had some programming in it in high school, I already knew what I was doing. Far better than the teacher in the class. Every project in the class I found very easy and did perfectly within the parameters requested, often time going way beyond the requirements. The teacher didn't like one bit that I was far exceeding her capabilities and the level expected and would find every excuse to mark me down. Her favorite excuse was to take issue with my comments (where I didn't explain every obvious line of code in verbose text). I barely passed the class.
After that, I changed my mind and decided I wouldn't study computer science in university, instead deciding to skip school altogether. Eventually did go to university after a gap year, but to study design instead. I was completely turned off from learning CS by this one teacher and it dramatically changed the course of life after. I did continue coding and ended up building some cool stuff, including a couple startups before switching to venture capital.
Hopefully for these kids it'll be a trigger for positive change too.
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted.
With Jekyll being there, I can only assume the intention was to mention GitHub Pages as an example, but as it is the rules clearly say using GitHub is NOT permitted. They could've questioned this discrepancy before the competition while reading the rules before starting, and at the very least just not mention using GitHub.
I'm not a web design professional, but they appear to have used it 3 ways-- 1) hosting and URL; 2) GitHub logo/branding on the footer and 3) back office collaboration tool.
I suspect it was uses #1 and #2 that generated the confusion, and while I am sympathetic to their feelings about the competition and DQ, I too might have been confused about whether they leveraged a "Wix-like" function to generate the page.
To you and me it seems obvious, but to someone less familiar the rules clearly say using Github is prohibited, even if it is for the wrong reasons. At that point you should either get clarification of the rules, or take the risk and end up in the situation OP is in now.
Reminds me of my cryptography class in college. Before taking the class I had written a peer to peer encrypted messaging tool for fun and to learn about encryption. It had its own handshake, custom RSA, AES, ephemeral messages, tooling to discover peers...
Anyway in the last year of my CS degree I had a class on encryption, got barely a passing grade on the exam. One of the questions I remember was "What color is the lock in the address bar of Google Chrome that indicates a website is encrypted?", there were a bunch of others like that.
> Rules are rules are rules, and they must be followed,
Contra, "rules" are only effective when they are enforced, and when push comes to shove, most of the keepers of the rules will just discard them when it gets in the way of things they really care about.
Getting the enforcers of stupid rules to waive away rules so things can get done is a valuable skill in anyone's tool chest.
In the article's case, the teacher was being a pain. He didn't consult the team when the disqualifying issue was found, nor did he consult with the TSA to clarify or get an exemption from the rule. The real lesson is to avoid or work around these types of people in any endeavor, they don't want to work with ppl to advance the cause of their organisation, they just love their rules.
> These young people learned a very important lesson: Rules are rules are rules, and they must be followed, even if they don't make any sense.
That is very obviously not the case, seeing how they literally followed the rules.
This isn't a case of pointless rules being senselessly enforced, it's a case of a teacher erroneously enforcing a rule they did not understand in a case where it did not apply.
> That is very obviously not the case, seeing how they literally followed the rules.
They followed the spirit of the rules rather than the letter, because Github was explicitly mentioned as one of the banned templating engines. Had they used an unlisted templating engine, they might have gotten away with it.
Github obviously does not belong in that list, but to the busibodies at the contest, that's irrelevant.
Even if we assume that Github is a templating engine, you also have to recognize that it is also a content hosting platform. Hosting content on github does not in any way indicate that said content also came from github, or any other template package.
This is yet another example of "authorities" making tech rulings without even a basic understanding of the technology they are trying to ban/permit/legislate/tax/etc.
Absolutely. The rule and enforcement of the rule are entirely stupid, but the rule does explicitly mention Github, and that does make this disqualification strictly according to the letter of the law, despite the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever. It's busibody bureaucrats exerting power over something they don't understand.
"Microsoft" is not listed as banned, "Github" is. Like I said, it's stupid, it's unreasonable, it's unfair, it makes no sense, but Github is listed as banned. Clearly by someone who doesn't understand it, and the judge who didn't understand it either just blindly disqualified them for explicitly using Github.
I'm not saying any of this is good; it obviously isn't. But the stupid ruling is entirely justifiable by the letter of the stupid rules. Github was explicitly listed as banned. Stupid, but that's the way it is.
It's good that students learn this lesson now than later.
Right now they get to learn these lessons with no skin off their backs. They're kids, most of the stuff they do is of no consequence one way or another.
Once they enter the real world and the workforce, they get to learn these lessons with prices ranging from reprimands to terminations. Hardly a fun thing to go through.
People have been using this argument against me since I was a child: "this is good for you because the big bad world will crush you", but frankly I thought it was nonsense back then and I still do.
The world is not filled with teacher-type people who will crush you for breaking rules. The world is filled with people who want to get things done, and know that the rules are only there to facilitate getting things done. If the rules get in the way to getting things done, they are ignored.
I see someone doesn't actually have to follow any legal regulations in their line of work.
After your 12th hour straight in an IT call with a bank trying to fix a simple issue multiple compliance officers are on the call all fighting each other, you come to realize the nightmare teacher types do exist.
If you ignore the legal regulations that don't make sense, maybe you'll get fired and end up working at a better job that doesn't have those regulations.
If enough people ignore the regulations, they'll become unenforceable. It's always a good thing to break rules you don't like.
Depends on the work bubble you're in, I've definitely seen places where following asinine rules tempted getting shit done because of the power of gave the enforcer and the disconnect they had themselves from the results of success.
Mostly.gov but some private places that are big enough without true oversight as well
The world is filled with both types of people. There are absolutely people who will crush you for breaking rules, for the sake of enforcing the rules, regardless of validity.
We should foster a world full of people who use their brains to interpret rules.
If we're going to blindly do something because "it's the exact rule written here" then we might as well replace all decision makers with an AI that never interprets anything.
Their teacher was wrong for not interpreting the rules correctly - everyone's aware of that. On top of that the people writing those rules were wrong as well for either assuming that teachers would interpret them correctly, or not being more explicit when writing them.
It's a competition that includes writing code as a team: one of the main things you'd want them to do is to use git and thus a website like Github.
> We should foster a world full of people who use their brains to interpret rules.
It's a competition. Competitions have rules, some of which are simply artificial barriers because of "competition". You can work to change the rules before agreeing to them.
If you disagree that a rule makes sense, provide your disagreement before entering.
Waiting until after you have found to have broken the rules you agreed to, to whine is simply unsporting and childish.
If the rule-breaker is not disqualified, it's unfair to the other participants who worked under those onerous rules to compete only to find out that one participant did less work by breaking a rule.
It’s not that easy. The problem with letting enforcers use judgment is it leads to selective enforcement, where the criteria becomes “who broke the rules” as much as “were rules broken.”
It opens the door to all sorts of bad outcomes. For instance, being a good debater/lawyer becomes at least as important as being a good coder.
I’m not saying judgment has no place, just that it’s not a panacea. It has its own unfairness.
You really can't get anymore explicit than "sites that
generate HTML from text ... such as ... GitHub ... are NOT permitted."
They even emphasized the "NOT" in "NOT permitted" to try and drive the point home for the particularly dense: You are not allowed to use Github, and all the others, period.
Is excluding Github okay? If you ask me, that question is irrelevant. The contest is about making a website by hand, nothing more and nothing less. This is an artificial environment and situation, and you either accept the rules and play by them or don't accept them and go elsewhere.
Incidentally, if you really, really want to use Github in spite of the rules forbidding you: You can just as easily do all your work on Github, even get Github to generate the HTML for you, then take all the results and upload it onto some web hosting server and just not mention you used Github anywhere.
Nobody would be the wiser and you successfully broke the rules you found so objectional (read: cheated, but nobody will know).
> You really can't get anymore explicit than "sites that generate HTML from text ... such as ... GitHub ... are NOT permitted."
> Is excluding Github okay? If you ask me, that question is irrelevant. The contest is about making a website by hand, nothing more and nothing less. This is an artificial environment and situation, and you either accept the rules and play by them or don't accept them and go elsewhere.
It's not irrelevant: it's the crux of the issue. The rule was clearly written by someone that lacks in-depth technical skills and is nonsensical. Ask yourself: would they have been disqualified if they used GitLab?
Saying "oh well that's the rules" is an awful attitude and does not prepare people for the "real world". The real world is full of people who have absolutely no idea what they're doing and like to swing around their authority. If you aren't able or willing to correct demands from people who are blatantly incompetent in a low stakes high-school competition, you're not going to have a valuable or fulfilling career.
> It's not irrelevant: it's the crux of the issue. The rule was clearly written by someone that lacks in-depth technical skills and is nonsensical.
That's irrelevant - all the other competitors had to labour under the burden of the rules, allowing one of the competitors to violate the rules gives that competitor an unfair advantage.
If you want to remove a rule that is nonsensical, you do it before you compete, you don't try to get it removed after you have gotten an unfair advantage by breaking it, because they it is too late for the other competitors to get the same advantage.
it is kind of irrelevant, because we don't know anything about the process that led to GitHub being included on the list. Could be lack of technical knowledge as you pointed out, but could as easily be an admin problem, or any other operational problems with clearing submissions, or something else.
> it is kind of irrelevant, because we don't know anything about the process that led to GitHub being included on the list.
The inclusion of GitHub, as written, is clearly either a mistake or the product of ignorance.
The students revealed that they spoke to the person who'd judged their submission, and that the judge doubled-double that they thought GitHub was a solely a temptation engine.
> We were finally able to talk to our school's CTE(Career and Technology) director and explain our situation. I told her about our website and how we were accused of cheating, even though we provided a public GitHub repo containing the history of the project. She then revealed that she had actually judged our project and explained that it was disqualified for using "GitHub, the templating engine"(Yes, she called GitHub a templating engine). She then pointed me to this rule: ...
The inclusion of Github is not a mistake, because Github[1] cites Jekyll[2] (another named example) as a feature and provides features (web hosting and design tools) similar to another example named: Webs[3].
Would it be more prudent to list "Github Pages" as the named example instead of Github? Possibly, being more specific is never a bad thing. However, the organizers deemed it appropriate to just prohibit all of Github for one reason or another, perhaps for sake of brevity since they only have so much time to judge all the entries.
Whatever the reasoning, the question is ultimately irrelevant. This is a contest, with rules to simulate an artificial environment under which the contestants agree to compete. If the organizers say "no Github", then no Github it shall be; if you don't like it you don't have to enter and compete.
> The inclusion of Github is not a mistake, because Github[1] cites Jekyll[2] (another named example) as a feature and provides features (web hosting and design tools) similar to another example named: Webs[3].
> Would it be more prudent to list "Github Pages" as the named example instead of Github?
It is a mistake because GitHub is first and foremost a platform for hosting code and collaborating. Jekyll is an optional feature in a tiny portion of GitHub's product catalog. Even if they specifically said "GitHub Pages" (which they didn't, so your argument is moot), that would still ignore the fact that Pages <> template generation. The page you link even references that you can use a generator but do not have to:
) Ready to get started? Build your own site from scratch or generate one for your project.
So better written rules would say "template generators like Wix or GitHub Pages using Jekyll are NOT permitted" Do you acknowledge how significantly that changes the interpretation of the rules and how poorly written they are in their current form?
‐--------
Edit: not to mention that the rule is explicitly in the context of template generation. Nowhere do they say "no GitHub (the VCS platform)" as you keep falsely claiming, the rules say "no GitHub (the temptation site)" which is a very different thing.
) H. Framework systems, such as Drupal, Joomla,
Wordpress, Bootstrap, or other current technologies
may be used; however, pre-built templates and
themes for these sites are not permissible. If a
framework system is used, a statement affirming
that the template or theme used on the framework
was built by the team must be posted on an “About”
section or page.
) I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted.
It's broader than you think. It's "sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files".
Which GitHub does. Hell, even their project right now does it. Because README.md gets translated by GitHub.
But that's cool, because that's just the readme. It won't be on the site site. So GitHub only if you use the repository part. No GitHub pages. Well, no GitHub pages, or if you do, .nojekyll, and README.md is ok, but only if it's not actually part of the site site.
The question is do you start carving out all of these exceptions for GitHub or do you just cut it out entirely. I don't want to deal with that for every single fucking entry. No. This is a high school design competition, I'm not dedicating that kind of time to it. No hosting on GitHub, end of story.
>Ask yourself: would they have been disqualified if they used GitLab?
Does Gitlab generate HTML from text files of some description like Github (eg: README.md -> HTML-formatted presentation)?
If so, yes. If not, no.
Github is only named as one of many potential examples of "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files". Ergo, anything that automagically generates HTML is "NOT permitted".
>If you aren't able or willing to correct demands from people who are blatantly incompetent in a low stakes high-school competition, you're not going to have a valuable or fulfilling career.
Two problems:
1. Kids are still learning. By definition they have no idea nor standing to judge what is competent and what isn't; they flat out /don't know yet/. You need real world experience under your belt if you want to go around declaring rights and wrongs.
2. The students completely missed their mark in how to bring about their objections. They should have read the rules beforehand and brought up questions and objections with the staff before the contest began. You don't complain about this long after the fact, and going off on tangents only worsens your standing.
Perhaps this is adequate encouragement for them NOT to join the work force? Why is being an employee and following arbitrary rules set by less intelligent people than oneself the default way to be a productive citizen?
Smart kids should start a business, and when this inevitably fails, try again. We no longer need an army of rule-worshippers like during the industrial revolution. Learning to reconcile oneself to repeated business failure is psychologically easier and much more valuable to society than becoming a cubicle dweller.
"Workforce" applies to both employers and employees, and employers are still beholden to regulations, contracts, and other requirements mandated from customers and regulatory bodies.
Rule-following constitutes probably less than 1% of what most entrepreneurs do.
Furthermore, mindless rule-following played a rule in essentially every bad human-caused historical event.
Even in checklist-heavy professions like air transport, lots of emphasis is placed on interrogating and understanding those rules thoroughly. I mean even lawyers, the profession that’s ABOUT rules, talk all day long anout the interpretation of and reason for each rule.
The key to the future is people who take ownership of problems, rather than rigidly offloading all cognition to a list of diktats concocted by someone of dubious ability.
That's not the lesson, the lesson is not to become someone like the person who disqualified them down the line. People who have rules instead of brains don't really belong in civil society!
Thank god these people and their ardent supporters aren’t cops. Can you imagine if some clown ticketed you for one of those anachronistic or nonsense laws that are still on the books in some places, like the infamous “ice cream” laws.
Maybe if they did follow rules, I wouldn't have gotten a ticket for "failing to display a front license plate" on a vehicle that had a front license plate...
That's a good parallel to draw. Far too many people believe that the police are always right and you must comply with any demands, no matter how unlawful or nonsensical.
Always hard to tell whether the sarcasm tag is missing. But the entirety of startup culture is "what if we didn't follow these rules that don't make sense". Sometimes you get a failure, sometimes you get spectacular success, and sometimes it dumps a problem on someone else.
But mindless rule-following, however inevitable it is, is also organizational poison. That's how you get situations where you're "doing everything right" but everyone - shareholders, staff, customers - ends up unhappy.
I’m just going to eat the down votes because I know teachers in real life. And they have plenty of things to do besides running a competition. As a group they don’t deserve the flak.
You can’t be so reductive.
This is a competition. This is not a startup. Competitions have rules. There is no evidence that the rules were withheld from these students. There is no evidence that the other kids were judged by different standards. There are probably other kids that read things carefully thought “that’s bullshit” and got on with it because they wanted to win. They could have read the requirements and challenged the rules before things got started in a public forum in an effort to get it changed because it was a bad rule.
Are people here really arguing that they should be given an advantage over the other kids in a competition, because these kids kicked up a fuss? Even Djokovic didn’t get a free pass. And the Norwegian volley ball team were prepared to pay fines and potential disqualification.
Yes, but blind application of rules without context isn't the way. Even courts have to take the original intent behind laws into account.
> I know teachers in real life. And they have plenty of things to do besides running a competition
How does that prevent them from knowing what Github is, as the "person in charge of tech education" at that school? Nobody demands they keep up with every trend but someone able to disqualify teams in a web design competition should probably know one of the 5 most visited development websites in the world.
These teachers crushed some students. They 100% deserve the flak.
If they teach math and can't add or teach english and can't read then they deserve the flak. If a teacher doesn't know the difference between hosting a site and using a template they shouldn't be teaching Computer courses.
Showing kids that the rules are enforced by ignorant people is an excellent lesson. Squashing hope early is a great way to educate the young.
Nope, they learned that stupid rules are there to be broken, just you have to be aware of the consequences and be prepared to fight and sometimes lose.
The students were neither ignorant nor arrogant for interpreting the rules as they did. The person who graded their submission is at fault here, and the students deserve to be told this if they’re reading these comments.
Someone who doesn’t know the difference between hosting a git repo and generating a static site with GitHub is unqualified to judge this project. The real lesson for these students is that there are people in this field who don’t really know what they are doing.
> The person who graded their submission is at fault here,
How? The competitors who adhere to the rules are necessarily disadvantaged compared to the rule-breakers.
How do you now fairly judge a competition when you change the rules after the game has ended? There is no other way to resolve a breaking of a rule other than by disqualification, because if you remove that rule after the game has ended then all the other competitors have worked harder (because they avoided breaking that rule) and will be judged next to the rule-breaker who worked less.
You're looking at it from the PoV of the rule-breakers, and saying "This is clearly a stupid rule". Look at it from the PoV of those competitors who had to do without github - they are saying "well, it's unfair that those people can win when we had to work harder because we did not use github".
And to be even more clear: the stupidity is in complaining about a rule after the game has ended.
Nowhere is this acceptable behaviour - you can complain about the rules before starting the game, you can try to get it changed, you can boycott the game, you can spread awareness ... but when you complain only when you were caught out, then that disqualification is soundly deserved.
> You're looking at it from the PoV of the rule-breakers, and saying "This is clearly a stupid rule". Look at it from the PoV of those competitors who had to do without github - they are saying "well, it's unfair that those people can win when we had to work harder because we did not use github"
You're right, it isn't fair if students were denied the use of industry-standard tools because of the technical incompetence of the competitions administrators falsely believing GitHub is a website generator. Sure, the students are obviously miffed that they were disqualified, but they were obviously following the spirit of the competition.
I hope this rule is amended and further clarified so that it's fair in the future. As it stands, it's very clear that the rule was written by someone who doesn't know what GitHub is and not by someone who doesn't want version control to be used.
) We were finally able to talk to our school's CTE(Career and Technology) director and explain our situation. I told her about our website and how we were accused of cheating, even though we provided a public GitHub repo containing the history of the project. She then revealed that she had actually judged our project and explained that it was disqualified for using "GitHub, the templating engine"(Yes, she called GitHub a templating engine). She then pointed me to this
rule: ...
What unfair advantage is gained by using GitHub to store the code? A privately hosted Gitea instance would have accomplished exactly the same thing without technically breaking a rule.
I would understand this point if they were leveraging Actions or something, but that isn’t mentioned so I’ll assume that is not the case. Their usage of GitHub does not appear to have been anything more than a convenient repository host.
> What unfair advantage is gained by using GitHub to store the code? A privately hosted Gitea instance would have accomplished exactly the same thing without technically breaking a rule.
If there was no advantage, then the students looked at the rules and said "Yup, those don't apply to us" and proceeded to break them?
It's a competition!
ALL the rules in competition are more or less artificial; that doesn't mean that competitors should expect to break them with no penalty.
> I would understand this point if they were leveraging Actions or something, but that isn’t mentioned so I’ll assume that is not the case. Their usage of GitHub does not appear to have been anything more than a convenient repository host.
If it gave them no advantage then they shouldn't have risked their entry being disqualified by using github.
It was a pointless risk for no gain, from the way you say it.
Are they not? The rules clearly state "no Github", and when confronted with that fact their response is "it's stupid" and to go off on tangents about Github this and Github that.
That's being ignorant of the rules, and being arrogant when you are told to abide them next time.
I actually learned the opposite of what you're preaching in school. I struggled to shorten a report to meet requirements. A friend of mine was 10 pages over the limit and went on to win a laptop with his report.
Some rules are more akin to guidelines, turns out. It's not unreasonable to interpret this instances' rule as "no templates" rather than "no GitHub".
The rule is: "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files ..."
Followed by an inexhaustive list of examples: "such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit ... "
Finally closing off with a strongly emphasized: " ... are NOT permitted."
No matter the interpretation, you're not supposed to use something that can automagically generate HTML, which Github absolutely is one such example. Whether you "only" use Github as a file repository is irrelevant, you are not allowed to use Github, nor all the others, nor examples not named.
For what it's worth, I will point out that Rule G (permits use of "state-of-the-art web-based applications") and Rule H (permits selective use of Wordpress, Joomla, et al.) are in conflict with Rule I (this rule) because such tools and underlying tools like PHP and JavaScript are "tools that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files". If rules should be reconsidered, they are Rules G and H.
Sometimes rules are poorly written, outdated or straight up mistaken.
I doubt the original intent of the rule was to disallow GitHub as a collaboration tool since it's the largest coding collaboration tool out there. It's even its primary use case .
Interpreting the rule as what it meant to be seems appropriate to me. The world isn't as rigid as you paint it to be.
If you were to really code a website without tools capable of generating html from text you'd find yourself coding with pen and paper.
"Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted."
That rule is NOT clear; it implies that Github is forbidden specifically as a "site that generates HTML". There's no reason to interpret it as meaning that you can't even link to a service that happens to provide templating and HTML generation, and which you are actually using only as a SCCS.
I would certainly interpret that rule as meaning that you can't use template engines or HTML generators. Which they didn't. I would not interpret it as meaning that you can't use anything provided by a service that ALSO supports templating and code generation. The teacher was a dick.
The rule is "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files ... are NOT permitted." and goes on to mention an inexhaustive list of examples which names Github among others.
That is abundantly clear you cannot use Github.
If you didn't read the rules, that's ignorance. If you read the rules and knowingly violate them, that's arrogance. If you unintentionally violate the rules but rebuff fair judgments as stupid, that's also arrogance. If you argue pedantics to try and find loopholes, you're an asshole.
It boggles the mind why "no Github" is such a controversial point.
> The rule is "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files ... are NOT permitted." and goes on to mention an inexhaustive list of examples which names Github among others.
> That is abundantly clear you cannot use Github.
This would be like calling someone ignorant and arrogant because they were browsing hackernews at school and a clueless administrator thought it was a criminal website.
> This would be like calling someone ignorant and arrogant because they were browsing hackernews at school and a clueless administrator thought it was a criminal website.
Well if the school specifically forbid Hackernews, and mentioned it by name in the list of forbidden sites ....
"Sorry, the rules clearly state that you can't browse websites that promote hacking or other criminal behaviour, like hackernews. It doesn't matter that HN isn't actually a criminal website, we must always unquestioningly follow rules."
> "Sorry, the rules clearly state that you can't browse websites that promote hacking or other criminal behaviour, like hackernews. It doesn't matter that HN isn't actually a criminal website, we must always unquestioningly follow rules."
It's childish and immature, in a competition, to question the rules only after you have been caught breaking them.
I never said rules should not be questioned, I said that you should question them before agreeing to them, not after you have been caught.
> It's childish and immature, in a competition, to question the rules only after you have been caught breaking them.
How is it childish and immature? They were clearly following the spirit of the competition.
Furthermore there is no indication anywhere, unless I missed it, that they were cognizant of that specific rule prior to the competition. Perhaps they saw "no template generators" and didn't pay attention to the examples. Even if they specifically knew that GitHub was mentioned, they could have reasonably assumed that the rule specifically referred to its tenplating features and that they were fine.
> Even if they specifically knew that GitHub was mentioned, they could have reasonably assumed that the rule specifically referred to its tenplating features and that they were fine.
You cannot claim it's a reasonable interpretation when no other competitor, nor the person who wrote that rule, nor the person who adjudicated that rule ... thought that.
Sure, to you and me, we know what the intent must have been, but you cannot change the rules after the competition has ended because that is unfair to all the other competitors who abided by the rules.
> You cannot claim it's a reasonable interpretation when no other competitor, nor the person who wrote that rule, nor the person who adjudicated that rule ... thought that.
You're just throwing around blind speculation. The students didn't even know they were disqualified until they reached out to the regional coordinator, how would you (an uninvolved third party) know if anyone else was disqualified or the thoughts of any of the staff?
Edit: we also don't know what the person who wrote the rule meant because the students were only allowed to talk to the person who graded their submission and made the mistake in the first place. It's possible the person who wrote the rules meant "template generation features on GitHub" but just wrote it poorly. The rule in question is within the context of template generation, not VCS or anything else.
) H. Framework systems, such as Drupal, Joomla,
Wordpress, Bootstrap, or other current technologies
may be used; however, pre-built templates and
themes for these sites are not permissible. If a
framework system is used, a statement affirming
that the template or theme used on the framework
was built by the team must be posted on an “About”
section or page.
) I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted.
I'm more than okay with a little unfairness if it means stupid garbage rules like that can be removed, even retroactively. If I had to suffer through emailing source code back and forth with my collaborators because version control was banned, I would be beyond caring. Taking a competition so seriously that you prioritize "unfairness" over such blatant stupidity is far more childish than anything in the article.
> It boggles the mind why "no Github" is such a controversial point.
The rule gives a list of examples that are not allowed because they generate HTML.
It seems clear to me that you shouldn’t use these tools for HTML generation.
This is the spirit of the rule, if not the letter.
No reasonable person would interpret this to mean that you cannot use Github to host your source, because it has no bearing on the competition whatsoever.
You're going to need to cite a source for that one, skipper.
On the (what appears at this point to be the not unreasonable) chance that you just made that up, and on the topic of what not to do: false quotes on HN.
> You're going to need to cite a source for that one, skipper.
This comes pretty close: making fun of the person who enforced the rule that GitHub is not allowed:
> You heard it here first folks, GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for hosting code collaboration and version control through Git, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer.
That's not a quote. Where can the words "it's stupid" be found?
Here, let me show you a quote:
> > lecturing everyone "No, you really want to have 0 risk, you fools"
> On HN, please don't use quotation marks that make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. It may seem a minor point, but we've found that it's important for clarity and respect.
See, if you're going to make fun of someone because you think that they are ignorant of some piece of tech, then people are going to point out that you're no smarter, when you were ignorant of the rules.
Not to let your attempt to change the subject and retreat to the motte from the bailey go unnoticed, but I wonder: who is it that you think you're replying to?
I'll quote rules and other such things verbatim for accuracy, but I'm not going to quote entire paragraphs of some random writing verbatim since it's not worth my time.
The words "quote", "quotation", "mark", etc. do not appear anywhere within the HN Guidelines[1], to include any rules regarding quotation marks (there aren't any).
To call out someone's behaviour is not name-calling as defined in the HN Guidelines[1]. Did I call the author an idiot or a moron or anything to that effect? No, I called out his behaviour as ignorant and arrogant, and called him a kid because he is a high school student which I presume to be less than 21 years old.
On that note, the HN Guidelines state: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."[1]
As such, please interpret "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted." in the strongest way possible: That using Github and other examples named and not named are not permitted.
> The words "quote", "quotation", "mark", etc. do not appear anywhere within the HN Guidelines[1], to include any rules regarding quotation marks (there aren't any).
No, but they do appear in the two links I gave—which describe the sort of behavior that HNers are expected to observe, regardless of whether it's written in a mod comment or on a mod-controlled page titled "Hacker News Guidelines".
If you think that's an inappropriate standard, then bring it up before just going ahead and doing it anyway, or leave for greener pastures. You succeed by being knowledgeable, considerate, cooperative, and also knowing where to draw your line in the sand—versus digging in (to defend the use of made up quotes and name-calling).
Reflexive respect for authority is how we get authoritarianism. Your comment has been downvoted so much it's barely legible, and that's exactly the reception it deserves.
Of course you don’t actually have to be in compliance. You only have to pretend to be in compliance. Maybe they’d have a chance if they argued that they used Github, instead of GitHub, which must clearly be a different website.
Your bitterness bleeds through your sense of reason.. Rules that are fundamentally broken are not meant to be followed, they are meant to be publicly ridiculed and laughed at.
Ah... student competitions... that brings up memories...
When I was 15 or so, I took part in a tech competition for under 19 year olds. I designed and programmed a website for "grading" your teachers, complete with an admin interface for generating anonymous 1 time use codes for students. The goal was to make it easy for schools to allow students to provide anonymous, private feedback to their teachers.
I didn't win (there were a lot of other submissions that were pretty amazing, so no hard feelings about that).
But a few months later, someone tipped me off about a public teacher grading website. It looked very similar to my website, it was the same design, just with different colors. I couldn't believe it, but digging into it I found out that one of the people running this website was a jury member in the tech competition.
Because they were shoddy coders and didn't properly quote user input on HTML pages, I used a simple script injection attack to show a Java script alert on one of the pages.
Their website went nowhere (turns out that allowing students to publically grade their teachers is not going to be used for constructive feedback...)
But I was quite disillusioned how the jury of this competition cared so little about the contributions, they apparently just saw them as free ideas.
As a former student that competed in both National and State TSA events from 2006 to 2012 (and won multiple trophies across events including the "webmaster" competition) I'm not really surprised by this outcome. That doesn't mean that its the right outcome but just a result of how these competitions are run.
The judges are all volunteers that may or may not have a background in the actual event they are there to grade. So you get someone that just shows up, reads the rules for the event and then judges accordingly to those exact rules. Which in this case since the website is hosted by Github it automatically gets disqualified for not meeting the rules of the event. This is a pretty easy thing to fix which is either A) Just have a custom domain that hides the github hostname B) host it somewhere else. The students here seem to have taken the B approach and have it up on netlify now.
I certainly empathize with the students here putting hard work into a project only to get disqualified on a technicality, it is a hard lesson to learn and one around maximizing your results within the rules as long as you follow all the rules. Hopefully they will be successful in getting the rules updated moving forward to be more clear about the default github page templates vs just raw HTML hosting.
my understanding was that they were DQed for using github, not hosting there.
Which is just bananas. I can't think of a single decent piece of software that doesn't use Version Control, and 99.9999% of the software I know uses git for VC.
We need a new format. This institutional nonsense is for the birds.
How about reading and adhering to client project specs? That is a legitimate and important aspect of engineering. The spec said no github. Jekyll is also a legitimate tool for "decent software". In the professional realm, you will be using code generating tools, so the argument that 'X is commonly used for software development and thus the requirements are boneheaded' does not hold up,
Sure, if the spec uses it's terminology accurately and is unambiguous, but...
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
> generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
> such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
> are NOT permitted.
Github is certainly not a template engine website.
One could make the argument that it falls on the engineer to discuss the spec with the client - but these are high school students, and when they did attempt to discuss the spec with someone they were given the bureaucratic runaround.
We should have bought this to our TSA advisor, but the judge was a different teacher at our school. The problem we had was that we had to reach out to find out that we were disqualified and the appeal period was already passed. It would have been so simple to move to netlify hosting as can be seen in the github repo. It all stems from the fact that we misinterpreted the rules and had no ability to appeal in the short period allotted.
> It all stems from the fact that we misinterpreted the rules and had no ability to appeal in the short period allotted.
Those running this have dropped the ball at various places here, that's clear. I was thinking maybe a preliminary step can be added to the contest to sanity check review a project (and thus allow for addressing cases like yours.)
But regardless, I hope this has turned out to be a fairly generous silver lining for you and your team. The site looks great. Next step, get investors and get those tourist up in the air. /g
Yeah, this is indeed one of those life lessons that is inevitable. I just feel like this is the kind of thing you should learn after you've had a chance to pursue your interests enough to turn them into skills.
Programming is a joy. Engineering is a discipline. Customer relations is an unfortunately necessary workaround to a set of dumb problems.
I had something similar with a TSA event in the late 90s. My buddy and I took second place in the nationals for Computer Construction. We asked "why didn't we get first place?" and the response was "because your inventory had serial numbers listed. No one does that."... which was jaw dropping, because both of us had receipts from recent purchases at computer shops were every serial was tracked. Near the end of the event we found out that the judge of the computer construction contest was a teacher at the same school as the winner. Our teacher did nothing to contest it as we had a flight to catch. -sigh-
To all the commenters that I see here writing comments among the lines of "rules are rules and must be followed to the letter", I strongly suggest you to read the book "Law for Computer Scientists and Other Folk" [1]. In one of the first chapters, it clearly explains that rules must be interpreted, and in doing so, one must take into account the specific situation a rule is being applied to. In this case, it seems quite clear to me that the intent of the rule was to prevent participants from using a tool that generates code for them, not to prevent them from using a version control system. So the real question to ask would be not if they used GitHub or not, but if they used it to generate HTML for their site or if they used it only for version control. In the former case, they deserve to be disqualified. In the latter, the rule doesn't apply.
I think that the real lesson here is that if a rule is too subjective to interpretation, is better to discuss it beforehand, because even if you're right the person responsible for enforcing it could still get it wrong.
> I think that the real lesson here is that if a rule is too subjective to interpretation, is better to discuss it beforehand, because even if you're right the person responsible for enforcing it could still get it wrong.
This is definitely a good idea. Sadly, it's all to common to discuss things beforehand and STILL have an enforcer get it wrong.
You could talk to the person responsible for writing the rules, but since the enforcers are different people with different interpretations, you can still get denied. Even between two different enforcers you could get different results.
It's unfair, it's sad, but that's the world we live in.
> "rules are rules and must be followed to the letter"
When I see this kind of blind obedience to authority I get absolutely terrified. I've lived through the Soviet Union (aside: which is why it's extra hilarious when HN posters who disagree with me think i'm a communist because I have "commie" in my username), I've spoken to people who lived through the after-effects of Nazi Germany.
And our industry is at the forefront of so much of soceital development. Computer Scientists already have to make endless conscientious decisions about privacy, robotics, facial recognition, and how our tech is used or not used to perpetuate repression and discrimination. And it's only going to get worse with the rise of AI.
So to see so many technologists just shrug and say "The rule said no GitHub" makes me terrified for how they critically evaluate (or don't) the requirements put in front of them for what they implement, and what it means for our dystopian future.
It's also infuriating that "critical thinking" and "healthy distrust of authority" have become appropriated by the alt-right to spread COVID vaccine conspiracy theories, and at this point I even hesitate to say things like advocating for "challenging authority" because the concept has bene politicized to mean "challenge thinking for the benefit of your community and society instead of your own individual wants", or even more simply "challenge the left/progressives".
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files
Github pages allows you to write index.md instead of an index.html, and therefore they count it as a webpage generator. Not sure if these kids used a markdown file for a page, but the capability is there and that makes Github more than just a dumb web server that serves html.
Possibly the judges are non technical, just basic designers so they can't tell the difference, so all Github pages would be banned and not just the markdown ones. But I think it would be better if they told the students so they could move it to a clean server in that case.
They used GitHub pages as a dumb host for HTML files, JavaScript, images, CSS. Repo link in the story, here for convenience: https://github.com/thstsa/spacetourism
Even has a .nojekyll file in the repo, and they since moved publishing to Netlify.
But you can use pure html in many other generators, if they ban based on capability and not usage then the ruling is as intended.
I agree they should have just been asked to move it to another site in that case so the judge can be sure there isn't anything going on behind the scenes, I wonder why they didn't just ask that the instant they saw it was github pages instead of just disqualifying it without notice?
> I wonder why they didn't just ask that the instant they saw it was github pages instead of ...
It sound like the person who did the judging isn't technical at all, so saw "github" and that was the end of it. They don't know any better themselves.
The git history is publicly available in the repo and you can see all the changes are directly to the source. They obviously were not using a generator.
It would be difficult to find a web host that doesn't support a variety of templates and HTML generators. What should matter is whether the students used them, not whether they are available on the same host.
Being "technically right" is more rightness than some teachers require: We all know about teachers who are right because they are teachers, ditto bosses and family members and so on. Learning this now is good experience, and learning it in a context where they might even be able to leverage it into a job interview is even better.
Sure. And I think you can host your own HTML/CSS/JS on Wix too.
It's reasonable to blacklist a whole range of solutions that contain the ability to be used as template engines and then insist the students use something else.
I don't think it's reasonable to blacklist the most popular VCS website used among developers. It's a competition for devs, they _should_ be using version control.
All it would take is a cursory glance by another dev to know if they used templating or not, which I would consider baseline for a developer contest.
The article says their teacher just seen it was on GitHub and disqualified them off the bat. Unreasonable imo
They hosted it on GitHub. Not stored the source there. Hosted it.
Besides, I would say that teaching people how to use version control is good. But there are lots of non-GitHub solutions. Prefer those for students! Teach them the fundamentals.
It’s disappointing how many comments here focus on the trees and not the forest. Regardless of the intent of the GitHub rule, this is supposed to drive interest in web development among young people, and instead it’s an exercise in bureaucracy and semantics.
Tools which pull code from places like ...github...are not allowed. # Github as a tool doesn't generate code.
Tool like ...github... which generate code are not allowed. # Github is certainly a repository from which code templates are pulled.
Love the "results are final". No flexibility from people running things is a great quality to prepare youth for the real world of navigating customer service.
Also the teacher telling them to just wait when they're the one who judged it.
Is it a given they would have won? Who were the winners and what did their work look like? Even with the best of intentions they would have to (a) re-register the entry, (b) redo the competition or review against current winner. And then possibly (maybe!) judge it to be superior to the current winner and then open that can of worm, or not.
1) acknowledge that their judgement was erroneous,
2) publish that as a correction, listing the project, ideally with a small apology and at least some details on how the entry would have been judged if not for the GitHub link and
3) create a separate prize for "projects our judges learned valuable lessons from".
It’s an interesting aspect that in my professional career definitely nothing is final. But customer service can really be inflexible, even when there is no risk, or it would be even better for the company.
I looked at the code and one important thing to note is that you should not use any element + onclick + window.open for links. Links should be <a> tags. The ones you currently have are impossible to navigate with a keyboard (that's called accessibility) and for someone that isn't running JavaScript.
Feels like whoever is running or judging entries for the TSA Webmaster Competition is not very literate in the field they are judging, if they consider Github a template engine.
Hi, I'm Shiloh, the guy that made the original reddit post and medium article. After reading some comments, I clarified my statement on GitHub's role in the CS industry
Your project is prettier than most commercial sites I've seen, and prettier than anything I've built after nearly two decades in the industry.
I noticed the more prominent "Purchase" color on the upsell plan. That either means you went above and beyond on your design research, or have better instincts than many founders.
Good work! Keep it up and you'll really go places.
This must be really disappointing for you - I think most people would agree you didn't break the 'spirit' of the rules even if you did maybe break the letter of the rules.
It would be great if you could re-draft that clause in a way which makes sense, and then get back to your teacher to see if she can influence the competition organisers. That way, next year's competition will be just a little fairer.
Training our next generation on proprietary tools like GitHub isn't the way though. Understanding a VCS (i.e. Git, Mercurial, darcs, Pijul, etc.) is great skill and almost certainly a job requirement, but a specific platform? Its classification as “industry standard” could and should be debated as well.
Is that why most people don't know stack-based Git flows or how to using send-email? GitHub only really works on the pull request model which is not the only way to use Git. There are pros and cons to these workflows, but if skills are generic, then you can just say "Git" or "Git forge" without needing to specify a platform.
send-email/stack is very niche in use from my experience. Only the Linux kernel and SourceHut really make heavy use of it (and from what I've heard, SourceHut is also looking into at least giving developers the option to not need to use send-email, but no clue how far that is).
The reality is that tools like send-email just... don't really work under the current email oligopoly (since the big providers both heavily filter emails and generally consider IMAP to be insecure). That entire model dates back to the days where email accounts mostly were tied to universities and as a result an emails name had a lot more meaning.
Heck, even for the kernel, send-mail is starting to fall out of practice because it just renders like shit in most email clients. It's a rather dated model.
The pull request flow is the de-facto industry standard, basically all but the oldest git-based projects use it. Not all are on GitHub (since it's proprietary or just straight up issues with GitHub as a company), but even when they aren't, self-hosted git servers like gitea and gitlab are both still using that exact flow.
The examples where this isn't the case are generally rare enough that they're worth more learning as a procedure for that project than as an easily transferrable skill.
PostgreSQL uses a mailing list and Google uses Gerrit to name two "major" counters. There are plenty of big projects and orgs operating under different models.
I'm talking about stuff like Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc. What I am saying is that most of the paradigms that GitHub has have familiar if slightly different implementations in other places.
But they aren't the only ones, nor the only ways. It's not necessary to know other paradigms, but knowing of their existence is nice, but also they should never be discounted as lesser methods of doing source hosting and code review--especially when used by large orgs and projects.
It's not realistic to suggest people avoid GitHub with the kind of market dominance that GitHub has. I while I empathise with the sentiment learning GitHub is absolutely a tool that will help them get jobs in a way that Git alone won't.
That's precisely the thing we should avoid. Learning on free software like LibreOffice Calc would be better just like learning GIMP would be better than students learning Adobe Photoshop and demanding employers buy these licenses/subscriptions. You can self-host Git, but there's also plenty of alternatives that are built as free software.
You are fooling yourself if you think libreoffice has feature parity with ms office, and gimp with Photoshop. Gimp doesn't even have feature parity with krita.
I have never, in 20 years in the business world - and that includes long years working closely with people in controlling - see anyone do something in Excel that could not be achieved in LibreOffice with similar effort.
Yes, there is no 100% feature parity. But there is feature parity in the things that people actually use.
Yes, I think MS Office / Libre Office is a bad example. Adobe Cloud (Photoshop) to GIMP and Maya (or equiv) to Blender are far better points and counter points.
The Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem has very strong lock in todo with workflow and collaboration (amoung other things). It's not that you couldn't do the vast majority of those things with another tool (open or not, e.g. Affinity), it's that the company you're going to work for is going to look at your Resume for experience with Adobe, and issue you a laptop with adobe on it, expect you to produce AI and PSD files (and now of course Figma for certain subsets).
GIMP is clunky and is not pushing the boundaries. Some of the newer smart tools in Photoshop are impressive in their ability to select and delete objects. Even Affinity which offers very polished products is going to struggle.
Blender on the other hand is a prime example of where an open tool can make strides to break the stranglehold. It has a very focused team of collaborators and a clear roadmap that is taking it from a tool that was quite hard to learn even if it was powerful into something that could become the industry standard.
The UX of Blender compared to what it was 5-10 years ago is so much better. I'm not sure the same could be said of GIMP.
That power comes both from strong direction and a growing and active community.
> - see anyone do something in Excel that could not be achieved in LibreOffice with similar effort.
> Yes, there is no 100% feature parity. But there is feature parity in the things that people actually use.
It's not close to being wholly about the capability of the product itself.
Excel has the incumbency advantage - more people are familiar with it and more people already have it. Switching to LibreOffice therefore often means switching to a tool you don't know as well and then living with interop issues with your co-workers that are still on Excel. For LibreOffice (or any other competitor) to do something with "similar effort", it has to overcome those headwinds.
If you look at the history of spreadsheets, there is a long history of "better" products coming along, but only a few that were good enough to be able to displace the incumbent.
* VisiCalc - The First
* Lotus 1-2-3 - Runs on the PC, has graphics, and a bunch more capacity than VisiCalc
* Excel - GUI support
* Google Sheets (maybe) - Online real-time collaboration, etc.
There were many others along the way, and many of them could make the same claim you're making here about LibreOffice. (Multiplan, Improv, WingZ, Quattro Pro, Framework, etc.....)
Parity is ok, but the goal really has to be 'so much better that it justifies all of the switching costs'....
To not deal with those headwinds because it is difficult to pick-up a new tool—especially if you haven’t in a long time or aren't interested in the tool/technology—we should priortize kids learning FOSS tools. Especially if it's not often used, I think most folks we be happy with both meanings of ‘free’ as something to pick up every once in a while. Most of the differences matter only once you're a power user. I use LibreOffice for the reason because I open up a document once a month, not my daily work.
And Krita doesn't hold a candle to darktable for working with photography on RAW images. So? The point is that the basic features a students need to know will be covered by free software or there will be an alternative that does. Having feature parity isn't important if copying another software isn't a goal--versus just making something good.
How many advanced GitHub features not present on other platforms do you think students are using? If the answer is none, then there's no reason to choose a proprietary service they can't hack on and are required create accounts with a for-profit entity.
I notice from your blog that you have links to a number of commercial services including Keybase. Keybase is another really great example of the disconnect between the underlying open source (GPG, etc) and something that is easily approachable and just lets people get on with the things they want to do.
We shouldn't use Keybase, but the nearest alternative open-source, Keyoxide, is not functional unless you're an engineer. Keybase on the other hand is perfectly usable without being an expert in the underlying cryptography.
Similarly Github has a huge number of features that a usable by people that aren't developers (PRs etc).
If you want a point to your side, GIMP is a bad hill to die on. Blender is a much better example of a tool that we should be teaching as opposed to Autodesk Maya (etc).
That's the thing with Blender though, it has feature parity with the things it's competing with and a community and network effect. For something open source to compete with GitHub it would need to be so much more than Git and offer the community and discovery that forms a big part of the "open" GitHub.
In the meantime people need to get things done. NOT teaching them the tool they're inevitably going to use is just a pointless battle to fight. Better to create the alternative first and lure people with straight up feature benefits.
> I notice from your blog that you have links to a number of commercial services including Keybase...
Blog has been under redesign-rebuild for a long time--other priorities. Said services were planning on being removed and replaced with alternatives as mentioned.
They always are the last to be updated (mine also).
We don't disagree in principle about open tools being better. I do however think that there isn't a viable alternative to GitHub at this point. The same could have been said about ExpertExchange at one point, and while StackOverflow isn't perfect, they do at make everything Creative Commons.
Tackling GitHub would require building a platform where all of the other tools such as Pull Requests, Actions, Issues were also represented in a portable format. Recognising that Git is just one interface to GitHub now rather than the main part of it.
Truth. Vendor lock-in is a concern when it comes to platforms. One thing that can help is writing shell scripts (or Nix building those scripts) for CIs to run minimally. With the merge request model having issues scaling, I'm curious how long til we push to a different model, or a different tool like darts/Pijul.
>learning GIMP would be better than students learning Adobe Photoshop
Will disagree on that for as long as GIMP lacks non-destructive editing (according to FAQ will be introduced in v3.2) since that changes drastically workflow.
Not untrue. I've waited like 10 years for that feature to arrive. However, once Adobe went subscription, and my software philosophy changed, darktable was actually better than Photoshop + Lightroom. Krita did a great job for digital painting (which I rarely do). But, GIMP is still a go-to for resizing images, making small adjustments to color balance, exporting to a different format when I don't know what I'm look to do (where ImageMagick is fine). GIMP still does a lot of things well.
It's relevant. The article has a sarcastic section asserting that GitHub is an industry standard and job requirement. What I don't like seeing is a new generation thinking DVCS implies Microsoft GitHub.
No it's not. Every time they have an outage more folks jump to other Git hosting alternatives. The biggest free software projects like Freedesktop, GNOME, KDE, are all self-hosting GitLab. Folks concerned with their data and the idea of US sanctions and corporate control look at projects like Codeberg. and Folks tired of slow UIs and ‘social’ moved to SourceHut and cgit. The thing that keeps replenishing the proprietary platform is new developers being told they need to put their projects on Microsoft GitHub.
Arguing decentralized version control, like Git, should have a centralized home is antithetical to the tool.
They were using both Github and Github Pages, however it was Github Pages with self-crafted HTML, not with templates.
I think the issue here is that they (EDIT: the teachers, not the participants) don't realize you can use Github pages for things other than template-based pages.
People are dissecting the minutiae of the rules and the role of github but at the end of the day its bananas that some kids got banned from a 21st century web competition for using the proper tools.
edit: As a consolation prize HNers could follow the OP and his team-mates on medium or elsewhere
These people are now better known among people likely to hire webmasters than whomever won the competition.
The students did not violate the rules. The rules say that template sites like Wix, GitHub, etc. may not be used. They did not say "such as" GitHub. There's a difference. GitHub is merely illustrative of the template site concept, in this case incorrectly.
The controlling requirement is that it be a "template site". Which GitHub is not. So this is a drafting error, not controlling language.
"Like" vs. "such as" has been a question on the Graduate Management Admission Test, because it is a distinction which might matter in a contract. But that distinction is somewhat archaic and probably beyond many teachers.
We're doomed. If this is how we introduce kids to tech, we can guarantee they bail and do something more intellectually rewarding, like Business Admin or Sales /s
For real though, a similar thing nearly happened to me. over a decade ago I took a community college class CS101 - and it was taught by a guy with no knowledge and no investment (and they got you started with Java, of all things). Totally killed my interest. Fast forward to three years ago and I was lucky enough to find my way into the field through self-study, but quite nearly gave up on the whole thing forever because of a pug-ugly initial experience. And this was way after high school.
Official rule is: "Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted."
I still don't think this blanket bans GitHub; only in the context of using it as a tool for generating HTML from text, which the kids did not do.
From the original reddit thread, I emailed the TSA to point out this, and one other stupid point - they expected 100% uptime from the students sites.
If this is supposed to be teaching the next generation of devs skills, then we've got a lot of Junior Developer Therapy ahead of us as we unteach the bad stuff.
Credit to those kids. School should be ashamed of themselves for that teacher’s inability to understand the nuance of the rule and more importantly work with and advocate for those kids. The teachers role never should be adversarial.
That being said, the cynic in me sees the “Technology Students Association” as a massive grift that would make the College Board blush and these competitions are simply college app padding, with enough categories and regional levels that everyone gets a line item (well I guess except these kids.) It’s disappointing and frustrating but ultimately of little importance.
It's extremely frustrating when people CHOOSE to not understand something.
On the other hand, it's bad to assume that because "everyone uses it", it's OK.
Having dealt with people who send code as HTML email with quotes replaced with "smart quotes", having been sent links to files / tarballs that don't actually link to those file / tarballs but to a web page instead, having been sent to sites that require knowing how the site works and/or browsing around and being unable to use a link to download directly via curl / nbftp / wget, I can understand that a group that doesn't want to deal with superfluous distractions would have rules about what can and can't be used.
GitHub is NOT trivial, and it is extremely browser centric. Trying to just download a file is an exercise in frustration if you're not familiar with GitHub. Copying a link to your clipboard that can actually be used to download a file is next to impossible, unless you already know how to use GitHub.
I can fully understand why the competition organizers specifically forbid the use of GitHub in their rules.
> GitHub is NOT trivial, and it is extremely browser centric. Trying to just download a file is an exercise in frustration if you're not familiar with GitHub. Copying a link to your clipboard that can actually be used to download a file is next to impossible, unless you already know how to use GitHub.
> I can fully understand why the competition organizers specifically forbid the use of GitHub in their rules.
These concerns and specifically banning GitHub (the version control platform) were never mentioned by the organizers. The only reference to GitHub is in a section explicitly about pre-built template and sites like Wix that generate websites. At the very least we ought to recognize that the rule is ambiguous and ought to be amended.
) H. Framework systems, such as Drupal, Joomla,
Wordpress, Bootstrap, or other current technologies
may be used; however, pre-built templates and
themes for these sites are not permissible. If a
framework system is used, a statement affirming
that the template or theme used on the framework
was built by the team must be posted on an “About”
section or page.
) I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted.
One fallacy of web design, of any design, is that in order to be “good” it must be easy.
Sometimes there is a learning curve. Conceptual hurdles abound with a complex tool like GitHub. Working through hurdles help you grow as a technologist and as person —but having the right attitude going in, that’s on you.
A contest isn't about teaching the people running the contest new tools. The contest is about different groups (or people) competing on a level playing field.
Also, nobody ever said that design can't be, or shouldn't be complex. But web hosting is simple. You put files in a directory and point a web server to them, and it just works. If it doesn't, that's a failing of the designers.
Complexity of design and complexity of delivery are two totally different things, and complexity of design has (or should have) absolutely nothing to do with complexity of delivery.
> It's extremely frustrating when people CHOOSE to not understand something.
Indeed. From context it's obvious that site generators were banned, so that participants would have to actually code a solution and not just install Wordpress with a handful of plugins. Too bad retards who can't tell the difference between Wordpress and Github somehow ended up mentoring kids.
I have no idea why you think the opposite, but it makes perfect sense that web-centric things be disallowed in a website competition. The contest is about content, not about tools.
No, it doesn't make sense. You use a browser to view and interact with a website (which is what the competition is about). So why would Github being browser-centric be a ding against Github when the competition is browser-centric?
> You heard it here first folks, GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for code collaboration and version control, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer.
Git is, GitHub is not. Yes it gave us Pull Requests but it is just another Corporation build around Git.
Git was already quite popular before GitHub at least in technical circles. I was using it as my first version control tool when I was learning programming. I asked some programmer friends and the answer was: "use Git, it's 10x better than SVN".
Git is designed in a way that everyone has their version of the code locally. We were hosting our projects on another service back then. GitHub is the result of Git getting traction, not something that made Git popular.
Yeah, I was maybe exaggerating when I said "kernel devs". There obviously were people using git before Github.
But I don't think source control in general was as common back then as it is now. Source control was something for serious projects, and a lot of code wasn't under version control at all. If you wanted to host code somewhere, services typically charged per repository, and setting up repo hosting yourself was a hassle.
Github really made all that very easy, and popular. The alternative web interfaces for browsing git repos were atrocious, but even modern competitors like SourceHut are a hard sell to novices.
I think calling Github "just another Corporation build around Git" is pretty disingenuous.
He is talking about Github, but Im more surprised to see Jekyll.
On github, there is a slight possibility that you forked something.
What does Jekyll do.
If that's the case, they could even ban for using nodejs.
Sorry folks, you can't use SASS here.
But if it's explicitly stated in the rule book, I think the participant made the mistake of not getting to know the rules of competition.
Yeah, Im aware of that, but why is it on the same rank of Weevly and WIX? It's not a template generator.
Im talking about the list of banned things they can't use.
Probably because they googled 'list of html template creators ' and this was that which came out as a result on some random site they got presented as the first link.
Just my 2c, but those gaps look too uneven to be produced by a framework. They remind me of my own html from scratch when I didn’t use a formatter or linter haha
> OVERVIEW Applying leadership and 21st century skills, participants are required to design, build, and launch a website and present a given topic pertaining to technology.
I think if the purpose of the competition is to apply 21st century skills then they shouldn't ban 21st century tools.
This would be a facepalm moment for me if I were these guys.
Because while they used GitHub in the most common manner, to host a code repository. Not only did they violate the rules technically, they also inadvertently violated them practically.
README.md is a markdown file. GitHub parses this into that little blurb you see below the repo. This is technically a violation of the rules. Part of your project is technically generated by GitHub.
Yes, it is dumb. Yes, I would have done the same in your position. Because I also would not have read the rules that deep. Or just forgot that they counted GitHub among the template generators.
Ultimately, I would have just been kicking myself because I would have felt that this could have been avoided.
I'd also ignore the statement from peterkelly that you're probably smarter than those running the competition or who made the rules.
Also, consider that even if you were selected for consideration, you still may not have won. They didn't disqualify you because they were scared of your prowess. They disqualified you for violating a rule. I'm not sure how many entries they get per year, but it's likely they're looking more for reasons to drop than to add.
Remember, there can be only one winner. And that winner will be the team that made the fewest mistakes.
> GitHub parses this into that little blurb you see below the repo. This is technically a violation of the rules. Part of your project is technically generated by GitHub.
No, that's Github interpreting markdown for display on Github.com. That's not generating any part of the project that they submitted.
You can't use a site that takes markdown and generates HTML. It is a file in the project. By the letter, it counts.
And the reason stuff like this happens is because of people who like to bend the rules on technicalities. Where they hold to the letter but violate the spirit.
You have to draw lines somewhere in a competition.
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files
That basically covers every tool.. I don't know what "generate HTML from text" means, HTML _IS_ text.. so.. notepad is disqualified too I guess? Since that generates HTML files from text if you save the file with the .html extension ?
A [shitty] lesson learned for the unfair, arbitrary, or flat out incorrect decision-making by others that will affect you throughout life. How we react is what will make us.
A custom domain probably would have saved them from DQ. The github.io domain really threw up a red flag regardless of whether they used Github Pages or not.
I think how the situation turned out and how you dealt with it, gave you a much more important life experience! Dealing with BS project blockers by clients/execs and finding a way to turn it into something positive is not something they teach at school, well done team!
"GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for hosting code collaboration and version control through Git, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer."
Teachers can be the biggest a-holes on earth when it comes to irrational judgements. I recall doing a website building elective in middle-school where we hand coded a simple site. They made the content of the site required to complete the project and get a grade. I had been writing sites already previous to the class for hire for 2 years at that point so I figured this class was an easy A. I had ADHD and this was the 90s (zero understanding/help), so writing filler content wasn't going to happen. I turned it in expecting to get like a B or C. Nope, F. The site was perfect valid code. Teacher was just a jerk. Dropped the elective.
Thats okay, these are always run by idiots. I graduated in 2001 and we worked really hard on our site to profesionally design a site for a real company and we lost to a crappy site with a marquee and blink tag because it was more "dynamic".
I. Template engine websites, tools, and sites that
generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files,
such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit,
are NOT permitted. [1]
So the fact that you hosted it on Github disqualifies you. Regardless of whether you used their jekyll engine. I would immediately resubmit it from a shared hosting provider or by setting up an S3+CloudFront static site.
kids don't have credit cards; the organization should have been providing free paid hosting with git support and ability to deploy through github actions...it should have been: git and github is a requirement for hosting your code. imho
You're absolutely right. They should have provided VM's for each team using a secure linux os and instructions on how to connect and what their url is/would be along with a git repo to pull those instructions using the students ssh keys. If the students want to use actions to auto-deploy, that's fine, just make sure the key isn't in the repo and is supplied via params. This would have made any restrictions about "template engine" irrelevant and simplified the contest as well as provide a safe haven for the kids to "compute" in.
That's not even a tough break. It is the product of administrators who are not qualified to run the competition. I wonder if the same thing would have occurred if they used Plastic SCM.
Imagine having a US History important figure report contest. With a rule that forbid using anyone who was a US president. And someone uses Benjamin Franklin, and gets disqualified because someone on the rule committee thought "Franklin" was a US president.
> Template engine websites, tools, and sites that generate HTML from text, markdown, or script files, such as Webs, Wix, Weebly, GitHub, Jekyll, and Replit, are NOT permitted.
LOL. It's like a muskets-only shooting competition.
Just a bit jealous. We didn't have compos back when people mistakenly double clicked web site links. Was almost forced into using a barely templatable database engine.
> You heard it here first folks, GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for code collaboration and version control, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer
Indeed, it's not. It's a popular online hosting service for repositories for said tool, said tool being `git`, which by the way is fully functional for version control without a remote repository.
GitHub uses Jekyll as a template engine for Github Pages, and it was even mentioned in the rules, so technically they are in the right.
Yes, he's a kid, and I would hope he received a valuable lesson (for free!) in how the real world works.
In the real world, if a project you work on has specific requirements and you violate those requirements, you're getting reprimanded. If you keep it up saying "they're dumb", you're getting fired. Same lesson learned, but this time with an expensive price tag you will have to pay.
Reading and following the rules is a fundamental skill you need to learn and master if you want to survive and succeed in the real world. I'm happy that the education system is working.
I’m glad that they didn’t enter a competition meant to spur interest in technology, do something fairly reasonable, and be disqualified because they didn’t read the fine print instead of focusing on the competition itself. Oh, wait…
I’m not sure why the non technical teacher is getting flak, as much as I hate to admit it, they were just following rules and avoiding future headaches.
Assuming they were super technical and didn’t disqualify the students, what would happen when other competitors call foul for using GitHub? Now this makes the approver look bad, but also could have unintended consequences in the competition.
Me, I would have told the kids to use Gitlab or one of the other non explicitly mentioned repositories, because sometimes, as silly as rules can be, need to be followed literally.
It would be like having a creative writing competition that includes the rule:
"You must not use AI generated text tools such as: ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Microsoft Word, Notepad, Google Docs".
The problem with their rule is that half the tools are actually templating tools, the other is a set of vital tools to any sort of development. Whoever wrote that rule clearly knows next to nothing about what tools are actually used to build websites.
I don’t disagree with you at all, and your examples only exemplify my point. Someone, somewhere, has to make a decision or the rules need to be changed.
If the competition rules explicitly stated your example above and someone submitted a docx file or link to a google docs, they shouldn’t be allowed. You could argue you used eMacs or vi instead of notepad (as long as you don’t publicly state otherwise). However, it should be pointed out how stupid this rule is and have it changed.
Let’s use a real world example of this- if you apply to a job that only accepts docx resumes, what recourse do you have if they don’t take pdf? You can either not apply, or play by this specific “competition” rules, even if they were made by someone who is nontechnical.
How about the teacher have some curiosity, hear what they're saying, figure out the thing you don't understand, and suggest changes to the rulebook?
> Me, I would have told the kids to use Gitlab or one of the other non explicitly mentioned repositories, because sometimes, as silly as rules can be, need to be followed literally.
After they were already disqualified? The teacher doesn't even seem to know what git is if they thought this was actual grounds for disqualification.
Assuming the teacher was a reasonable person, I would have expectations that they would tell the children to make changes before denying them. There were many paths the teacher could have chose to teach (and learn!) that they chose not to, and resulted in their reasoning by exercising ignorance and disqualification of these students.
You really don't know why the person enforcing the most extreme interpretation of a rule without any interest in hearing why they might have made a mistake in order to disqualify a group of passionate young people from a competition they clearly worked hard for would get flak? Honestly, reading the replies to this post I'm relieved and surprised that you all didn't choose to go into Law Enforcement.
There are no reasonable people in law enforcement, they’re there to enforce the rules. Sometimes, you have to deal with unreasonable people and unreasonable rules, even if they’re wrong.
One of my close friends became a cop because he enjoyed helping people, resolving disputes, and building a rapport and sense of community. He thought that the job of a police officer was to protect and serve the community.
The best thing to do is to find some sort of constructive way to channel your experience. One path I would suggest is to consider launching your own rival competition, where the judges are volunteers from industry, and the prize is an internship at a company or something like that. This would not only provide your peers with a great opportunity to get quality feedback, but also serve as a really useful experience that would help you in your future career. What have you got to lose?
Perhaps you could even get GitHub to sponsor it :)