Yes, you did read that right. On 2/18/2023, my school’s Web Design team, including myself, Ben Nasse, and Nolan Yee, was disqualified from the 2023 TSA Webmaster Competition…for using GitHub. But before we delve further into this story of indifference, confusion, and vaguely written rules, here’s some background…
According to their website “TSA is a national, non-profit organization of high school and middle school student members who are engaged in STEM.” The organization provides students across the US with a variety of competitions, from Video Game Design to Audio Podcasting. Students compete against each other on a regional level, then advance to state, and eventually the best face off at the National Conference.
Got it? Ok, back to our story…
Coming into our second semester of sophomore year, my friends and I were enthusiastic about the upcoming TSA competition, specifically the Webmaster competition. All of us were passionate about web development and we were confident we could make it all the way to nationals. Our prompt was “Space Tourism: a company that will make you an astronaut.” From December to February, we worked diligently to create our little web mock-up brainchild: Armstrong. An intense 24-month program to turn today’s average Joe into tomorrow’s Neil Armstrong. We were pumped. We knew the potential this thing had and could barely hold our excitement on the day of regional judging, Saturday 2/18/2023. Before we knew it, BUZZ! The results were out! However, our eagerness was quickly replaced by confusion when we found that our team wasn’t listed nor was there an explanation. Weird. Our teacher advised us to just wait it out, so we did. Sunday rolls along; still no news. Weird. Not a word for the first half of Monday. Weird. Something’s off. We decide to send an email to the regional coordinator. Not long after…PING! She replied…
“Hello,
Your entry was disqualified for ‘Template engine websites, tools and sites.’”
Huh? We had just spent the past 2.5 months coding this site from scratch, no template or anything. To add, we had included a link to our public GitHub Repo at the footer of our site for extra credibility. Ok, this is probably a minor mistake. We email back, explaining our side and asking what parts of our submission were responsible for the disqualification or if it’s possible for the decision to be reconsidered…PING!
“The results are final.”
The best words to describe the overall feelings of my team in that moment were: dejection, bewilderment, and — worst of all — defeat. But this can’t be it! We worked hard on this for months and we refused to let it end here. We email the TSA state advisor on the situation…PING!
“[The person in charge of tech education at your school] has been apprised of your concerns.”
Awesome! This should be easy: we just go to school, explain our situation to this person, and everything gets fixed!(This did not happen).
I arrive at the school, confident that my team and I are about to be re-entered into the competition we had spent the entire semester working towards. I explain the situation to the teacher and in return, I’m hit with the curveball of the century:
“Oh, I was the one who judged your submission.”
Ok, great. I’ll finally get to hear the justification behind the decision.
“You were disqualified for using GitHub, the template engine.”
She then points out this rule in the Official Rulebook:
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.
You heard it here first folks, GitHub IS NOT the industry standard for code collaboration and version control, an expected tool for anyone entering the industry and a priceless skill for any aspiring developer. No, it’s a template engine, along the likes of Wix and Weebly. I try to explain that we used GitHub to host our code and site and that we have evidence we did it all by ourselves, but she simply says it’s too late to do anything and we can try again next year. Darn.
You may think this is a sad ending to our little saga, but we posted the situation to r/webdev and it amassed 300k views on the front page of the subreddit! Even cooler, the traffic gave our project 30k hits in one day! So yeah, our project will probably never see light of day in TSA, but our story was seen by 300k other passionate developers, who flooded us with advice and encouragement.
Btw, if you wish to see our site or the rules we “broke,” our project can be found here and TSA’s 2023 Webmaster Rulebook can be found here.
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Maribel Serna