Collaboration vs Plagiarism - TheIronYard--Orlando/2015--FALL--ROR GitHub Wiki

Collaboration vs Plagiarism

Software development is a collaborative enterprise. Developers share knowledge through books, conferences, meetups, blogs, Q&A websites, screencasts, podcasts, pairing, and even the occasional immersive boot camp. Throughout your career, starting today, you will be expected to make use of resources like these to make yourself a better developer.

At the same time, you are expected to justify your own work. Even in pair- or team-based projects, you should be able to understand and explain any piece of code used by you in your project. If you utilize code from another source, you take ownership of the maintenance and continued development of it. If you do use code from another source, be sure to attribute in a comment where it came from and who authored it. Therefore, exercise caution when playing "copy-paste-tweak" and always attribute your source.

Plagiarism -- "the practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own" -- is forbidden. The wholesale copying of source code and passing it off as your own work will only hurt your longterm success as a programmer and will be met with severe consequences in the class such as forfeiture of Demo Day privileges and job placement assistance or even expulsion from the cohort.