Guido van Rossum, John Resig, DHH, and Pamela Fox are Judges on CreateHS | Hacker News Reader

Guido van Rossum, John Resig, DHH, and Pamela Fox are Judges on CreateHS

createhs.com

114 pointseeirinberg33 comments

This looks really, really cool. The challenge for this month, revamping a high school's website, has been something I've poured many many loving hours into over my sophomore and junior years (I am now a senior) in HS. I wrote it for free, open sourced the entire thing (http://github.com/aroman/keeba), and now most of my school's student body uses it every night.

I would be positively elated to get my project even looked at my the judges, but I don't know if I'm eligible.

I wrote this message to the organizers via the site's contact page, reproduced verbatim below. It is my hope that posting it here will give it a better chance of being answered.

___

Hello!

First, this initiative looks really cool — thanks so much for organizing it.

Second, I am a HS senior and during my sophomore and junior year I took it upon myself to rewrite the student-facing part of my school's website. I have completely open-sourced the code, and the website is daily active use by the majority of my school's student body.

It is a complete alternative to my school's custom homework website, written and designed completely by myself. It dramatically expands the functionality and usability of the existing site.

I did this purely out of my own desire to create and to impact my school community. I was not asked to do this, nor did I receive any compensation for the work.

You can see more about the project, called Keeba, on my website here: http://aviromanoff.me/projects/keeba/

It has links to both the site and its source on GitHub.

*THIS IS MY QUESTION: Am I eligible for this challenge, being as how I've already created the website? It is of course still under active development, but it took many months to create.

It would mean the absolute world to me to get my project looked at by some of my heroes — the Python sabdfl and John Resig, as well as the Khan Academy crew and DHH. I sincerely hope this is acceptance

Thank you very, very much for your consideration.

Avi Romanoff aviromanoff.me

Hey Avi,

I noticed that your a teen who develops a lot, so I thought maybe it would be cool if you were a part of an upcoming teen developer community similar to HN that I'm working on right now at http://teen2geek.com. Also, if you don't mind my asking, how did you become so experienced in computer science so early in high school? I noticed that some of your software is now shipped default in some Linux distros, and that is really impressive, so I would love some tips from you :)

Hey,

Cool initiative — I've signed up!

As for how I got involved so early, the answer is curiosity, Google, open source, and fake-it-till-you-make-it. Just go out and build the things you want to build — not the thing you think you can build.

Thanks man! I'll try to follow your advice,and hopefully make it as far as you have!

I'm loving the amount of teens in development there are, considering that I am one myself. This sounds like a great way to get into the industry early on, and I think its awesome of Resig, Guido Van Rossum, and the others to support such a cause. I see that you are a young developer as well, so I'd like to invite you to a teen developer community (similar to how HN is structured) currently in pre-alpha that I've been working on to create a stronger community of developers our age - http://teen2geek.com . Nice job man :)

Awesome. Thanks!

Is the "Code A2 $100" prize a cash award or just a voucher to spend on whatever Code A2 is? If not, considering the sponsors, its disappointing that the prizes do not include something monetary for college.

Even $100 barely buys one textbook these days.

Congratulations to the person behind this project. He seemed to understand the importance of relationships in the execution of an idea, and seems to have spent some effort in finding great judges.

I am sure it also help that he has a vision that high profile people share with him.

Good luck with your project.

Thanks! I really appreciate the support.

I just went to my High Schools website and it looks TERRIBLE!

Yeah, same here! They have soooo many pages on a dinky little Google sites website, its really out of hand!

My school has a Mapquest Map. I didn't even know MapQuest was still in business. My buddy and I are looking at his school and there is a tree drop down menu that stretches beyond the bottom of my retina Macbook Pro.

Unfortunate it's just for HS students. I know my University's website could do with a lick of paint.

But great to see a competition for high school students to get into, something for them to show off their skills! I would've loved if my secondary school or college (UK here) did something like this!

It's a bit late for you to enter, unfortunately, but the UK does have something like this. I had the great pleasure of sponsoring a team in the Young Rewired State "Festival of Code" [1] in 2012 - which is open to 13-18 year old students and runs for a week in August.

If you're interested they are always looking for both sponsors (which basically means giving up a meeting room in your office for the week, and providing lunch for the team) and mentors [2] - who can spend some time with the team helping them shape their idea. It's a brilliant scheme, and a really inspiring week.

[1] https://youngrewiredstate.org/ [2] https://youngrewiredstate.org/festival-of-code/information-f...

Also a sophomore in high school, but I'm not doing anything as cool as this! Congrats! I'd love to chat with you sometime. Drop me an email at luke@simplyluke.com

Hey man, I'm trying to form a teen developer community over at http://teen2geek.com similar to HN, so maybe you could check it out. I'd love to see more people our age there :)

Signed up :)

Hey, I know you!

Hey, I met you in a similar thread!

This is awesome. Cool to see high school students working on such inspirational concepts. I'm excited to see where this goes.

Not to be contrarian or anything, but why isn't Pamela Fox mentioned in the title? Seems odd that she's the only omission from the photos on the front page.

Good question. When I tried to post this initially, her name was in it. But the length of the title was too long. I figured that I would just keep the creators of programming languages/libraries/frameworks since this is a site about that.

I understand your point (and just to be pedantic, only one of them actually created a language), but this is not a site about "that", it's a site about tech and while Pamela Fox has not created a popular lang/framework (not that I know at least), she has contributed a lot in many other aspects, specially when trying to educate people around tech, one example of that is her involvement in the girldevelopit chapter in SF.

Totally agree. Wish I could edit the title.

Use short names in cases like this:

Guido, John Resig, DHH and Pamela Fox

GvR

Administration: If possible, can we please have the title manually edited to include everyone?

Thanks.

Shortening David Heinemeier Hansson to DHH should do the trick for getting another name in there.

I believe only one of the listed people are the creators of languages (Rails is a framework, jQuery is a library).

No need to be nitpicky about it, he probably meant that...

Just edited that.

Only one of the four without a wiki page?

I'm wondering the same thing.

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