We were disqualified for using GitHub

Organize | Zheng Liyuan

Produced | CSDN (ID: CSDNnews)

Speaking of GitHub, I believe every programmer is familiar with it.

As the world’s largest developer community, GitHub now has 94 million developers. Under the open source boom, the number of GitHub users is still growing every year-so, who would have thought that using GitHub would become a “violation”?

This week, an American high school sophomore, Ifedolapo Shiloh Olotu, took to the Medium blogging platform to share a recent experience with his team: “We were disqualified from a national web design competition for using GitHub.”

The work that took nearly 3 months was inexplicably disqualified?

Late last year, the US nonprofit TSA launched a web design competition. The news quickly caught the attention of Olotu and his friends: “As soon as I entered the second semester of my sophomore year, my friends and I were enthusiastic about the upcoming TSA competition. We are both passionate about web development and I am confident that I can go all the way to the national competition.”

It is understood that the theme of the TSA competition Olotu received was, “Space Tourism: A Company That Can Make You an Astronaut”. So Olotu, along with his friends Ben Nasse and Nolan Yee, toiled for nearly three months from December to February to create a tiny site called Armstrong — a 24-month, A plan for ordinary people to become tomorrow’s Neil Alden Armstrong (the first astronaut to walk on the moon).

For this website design, Olotu themselves are very satisfied: “We are very excited and know that this work has great potential.” So, when the time came to February 18, the Olotu team, which had been looking forward to it, found that there was no promotion list in the region. When they were there, Qiqi fell into silence and confusion: “Armstrong”, which they spent nearly 3 months and everyone is optimistic about, was not selected?

With such doubts, Olotu decided to send an email to the regional coordinator to ask the reason, but the answer given by the other party made them even more confused:

Hello. Your entry has been disqualified for use of Template Engine Websites, Tools and Sites.

Apparently, neither Olotu nor his team members could accept the reason for the elimination: “Huh? We just spent 2.5 months writing this site from scratch, no templates or anything. To add credibility, we Also added a link to the public GitHub Repo in the footer of the site.”

To this end, the Olotu team sent another email to the regional coordinator, asking what the problem was, explaining that they did not violate the rules, and whether they could re-evaluate… The response was still prompt, but equally indifferent: ” The result is final.”

The rules say, GitHub is a templating engine?

Fortunately, the negative emotions did not linger in the team for too long, and Olotu quickly cheered up: “We have been working hard for this for several months, and we can’t let it end here!”

When the regional coordinator couldn’t make sense, Olotu reported the situation to their state’s TSA competition director, who was quickly told, “[The person in charge of technical education at your school] knows why.”

Upon receiving this news, the Olotu team came to the school immediately, and finally asked the exact reason from the teacher: “You were disqualified because you used the template engine GitHub.”

Facing a few stunned students, the teacher thoughtfully pointed out the rule in the official TSA manual: “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 allowed.”

Then, Olotu and they were even more confused: “This may be the first time you have heard that GitHub is not the industry standard for managed code collaboration and version control through Git, not the tool that anyone entering the industry expects, nor is it any An invaluable skill for aspiring developers – instead a template engine like Wix and Weebly???”

Although the Olotu team tried their best to explain that the website was made by themselves and that GitHub was only used to host the code, the teacher just said: “It’s too late to say anything now, try again next year.”

Support and encouragement from many developers

After this series of appeals, there is no hope of restoring TSA eligibility, but the Olotu team did not want to let “Armstrong” go silent, so they put relevant materials and links about this website and what happened to them on Reddit Sharing – To their surprise, the post got 300,000 views, their website got 30,000 hits, and many developers complained about it.

• “You should email again, explaining all the details, including all the code and commit history you submitted it on GitHub, and then ask her specifically why she disqualified you, and get a clear explanation.”

• “Whoever is judging entries in the TSA competition, if they think Github is a template engine, then I think they are ignorant about it.”

• “A lot of the judges are volunteers, and even if they score, it doesn’t mean they are professional. In many cases, they just make superficial judgments based on the rules. Since the website is hosted by Github, they feel that it does not comply with the rules of the competition, because the rules It says you can’t use Github.”

• “I’m a senior engineer, and I’ve looked at your project code and can tell you’re a very talented team of amateurs.”

• “As high school students, it’s great to be able to make such a design!”

Faced with the support and encouragement of many netizens and developers, the Olotu team is very pleased: “Although this project may never appear in TSA, our story has been seen by other 300,000 enthusiastic developers. We have benefited greatly from the advice and encouragement.”

So, do you have anything to say about what happened to the Olotu team, and have you ever experienced similar incidents?

The text and pictures in this article are from CSDN