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Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

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Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#61

Post by bilekas »

Jensson wrote: post #3

> 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, jus…

> Not sure if these kids used a markdown file for a page

This would be an exponentially more difficult task than a simple HTML page to design. If that was the case, I would award them myself!

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#62

Post by antihero »

bitwize wrote: post #54
peterkelly wrote: post #28

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 launc…

[flagged]

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.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#63

Post by Dalewyn »

onli wrote: post #59
bitwize wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'm really sorry you feel that way. I dont even disagree that this BS exists, but it is almost nonexistent in my world. Just to say this is not the lesson the students have to learn.

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.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#64

Post by salamo »

> 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.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#65

Post by Dalewyn »

antihero wrote: post #62
bitwize wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

[flagged]

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#66

Post by Tehdasi »

bitwize wrote: post #54
peterkelly wrote: post #28

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 launc…

[flagged]

> 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.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#67

Post by kenneth »

bitwize wrote: post #54
peterkelly wrote: post #28

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 launc…

[flagged]

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.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#68

Post by newaccount74 »

bluecalm wrote: post #50
newaccount74 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github and the projects it inspired, like Gitlab and Bitbucket, are what made Git accessible to the huge audience of developers it has today. The way Github presents repos organized by organisation, allowing everyone to fork and host their version of the code, that's what made git popular. Without Github, I don't think Git would ever have been adopted by mainstream dev audiences and would just be some arcane tech use…

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 tr…

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.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#69

Post by DocTomoe »

themoonisachees wrote: post #47
toastal wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: Disqualified from a National Web Design Competition for Using GitHub

#70

Post by boxed »

toastal wrote: post #27
signin0305 wrote: post #22

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

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.

What you say is 100% true. And also 100% irrelevant to the topic at hand. The latter is the problem.
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