GitHub recently announced GitHub achievements. It’s a great idea, but I’m really left scratching my head by what the achievements are.

The “Pull Shark” is open pull requests that have been merged. I’ve got a “4x” version. 4x makes NO sense to me given the number of repos I’ve contributed to, but… ok. Maybe it just maxes out at 4x.

That’s it, though, except for “Arctic Code Vault Contributor” which … is more chance than anything else.

I don’t really care that I don’t have more. BUT I can’t figure out what the eff they’re expecting a person to do that they would use to “recogniz[e] the many stages of a developer’s coding journey” that I haven’t done in my GitHub account.

Doubly so because Coderwall already did this for GitHub profiles years ago. They give you “achievement badges” by assigning you to “Organizations” that represent your achievements, and then those show up as icons in your “organizations”

…and they’re cool. Really well thought out. I’m having difficulty finding a full list of the Coderwall achievements, and I’m not sure this is even something they do anymore, but here’s the ones I have. I’m not suggesting they should ALL be used as GH achievements, especially not the language specific ones like “Mongoose” (see below) BUT things like the “Charity” and the “Walrus” badges? Those would be great GH achievements.

• Lemmings 100: …have open sourced at least one original repo that’s being watched by more than 100 devs.
• Charity: …members that have forked and commited to someone’s open source project.
• Opabinia: members that started social coding on GitHub within 6 months of its first signs of life.
• Forked: …members that have open sourced a project valued enough to be forked by someone else.
• Forked 20: members that have open sourced a project valued enough to be forked at least 20 times.
• Komodo Dragon: members that have open sourced at least one original repo where Java is the dominant language.
• Mongoose: members that have open sourced at least one original repo where Ruby is the dominant language.
• Mongoose 3: (same as Mongoose > 3x)
• Raven: …members that have open sourced at least one original repo where some form of shell script is the dominant language.
• Velociraptor: …members that have open sourced at least one original repo where Perl is the dominant language.
• Walrus: …members that use at least four different languages throughout their open source repos.

I guess my thinking is that I’ve done just about everything a person could do in GH except for having a repo used by millions BUT even on that I prolly contributed to one at some point. And yet, all i have is recognition for getting a PR merged?!?!

I know it sounds egotistical, and entitled, but the reality is that I’ve been using GitHub professionally and personally since roughly the time it began. Off the top of my head here are the things I’ve done in GitHub that are relevant to “the many stages of a developer’s journey”

• I’ve got original and forked repos in piles of languages.
• I’ve contributed to other people’s open source repos in the form of reporting issues, contributing to discussions, and submitting PRs.
• I’ve taken over ownership of other people’s repos when they abandoned them.
• I’ve done work in obscure languages, popular languages, and even Bash.
• I’ve had a repo starred by hundreds
• I’ve had repos forked my … many
• I’ve got repos in compiled and interpreted languages
• I’ve done all the normal, and most of the rare things you can do with git.
• I’ve shared my dotfiles for others
• I’ve contributed to languages, frameworks, and libraries
• I’ve got repos with server code and repos with client code.
• I’ve made private repos public, and public repos private.

What else is there in a “coding journey” that GitHub could be aware of that I haven’t done? I assume “YoLo” is some whimsical thing that maybe I haven’t done but setting aside random silly / quirky achievements, the fact that the only one I’ve got is “PR Shark” makes me wonder if they actually have any more than the 3 shown on their announcement page.