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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.
On top of that, until yesterday they actually (accidentally) ran Jekyll during CI as well because it is hosted on GitHub pages: https://github.com/thstsa/spacetourism/commit/27834acf978a7d...
That's just the commit where they added `.nojekyll` at Reddit's suggestion. (Unless I'm not seeing something on mobile.)
More context + the offending run is here.
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/117rw3d/was_just_di...
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.
Technically GitLab also generates html from markdown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Microsoft also has some web template code. Should that disqualify all use of any Microsoft product?
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.
Just to say this is not the lesson the students have to learn.
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.
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.
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 enough people ignore the regulations, they'll become unenforceable. It's always a good thing to break rules you don't like.
Mostly.gov but some private places that are big enough without true oversight as well
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.
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 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).
> 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.
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.
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: ...
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/119j8o4/part_2_disq...
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.
[1]: https://pages.github.com/
> 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?
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
no, this is tyrannical. "rules" are just words that somebody wrote down. that somebody can be wrong.
like in this case, it said "templating engine websites such as github" -- that's wrong, because github is not a templating engine website.