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Comment by pksebben | Hacker News Reader

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pksebben

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.

edit: formatting

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Exactly. Lesson here (and I hope OP and teammates read this) in my opinion is precisely this:

1 Spec conflates "github" and "templates".

2 Students take spec to teacher (who ended up being the judge!) and inform them of the error.

3 Spec is changed OR restriction (however boneheaded -- remember, clients) remains in place.

4 Team knows exactly what is what.

5 No article on HN. The end.

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.

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