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New GitHub Profile Badges Beta
- smcameron 4y agoGithub has had achievements for a ages I think, they just never used them for much. I know I've had "Arctic Code Vault Contributor", and "Mars 2020 Contributor" achievements for ages (but only incidentally, because I happen to have commits in the linux kernel.)
- ChrisArchitect 4y agoGamification. Lovely. I get the usefulness to people trying to build profile, but sheesh. When we getting those GitHub Stories?
- Ava433 4y ago
- candiddevmike 4y agoThis is a really dumb feature. Out of everything you could add to GitHub, why spend time on this?
- judge2020 4y agoIt’s a coding social network; these features keep people happy with the GitHub brand and they increase the amount of features any potential competitor must implement if they want to be competitive against GH.
- jkaplowitz 4y agoIt feels like the kind of thing that would be a side project. I've never worked at GitHub or MS and have no inside info on this, but I worked at Google years ago and any similar launch from them during (or before) my time there could easily have been a 20% project. Badges on Google's internal company directory proliferated and were widely enjoyed.
- onion2k 4y agoIt's fun. You remember fun, right?
- Fordec 4y agoJust because HN is a fun free zone, some evidently believe the rest of the world has to be also. The only way I can understand some of the reactions in this thread is that many are holding a belief the only reason to use Github is your anonymous desk job. Like the question of does the "YOLO" achievement apply to your automated CI pipeline is itself giving away private information by implication. I'm over here with 80% of my commit history just being recipe markdown.
- oefrha 4y agoI thought the Arctic vault and Mars badges were pretty cool, but these new ones are really cringe. Unfortunately they can only be disabled together.
- david_allison 4y agoOne of the achievements is 'YOLO': 'merged without a review'. We really shouldn't be encouraging this.
- mshockwave 4y agoyeah this achievement is really immature, maybe same as the one who came up with this in GH :-P
- O__________O 4y agoMore than likely, this is a red flag, not an achievement; or at least one would hope it is.
- bastardoperator 4y agoOnly if you can't imagine working on a project by yourself...
- throwaway3neu94 4y agoDepends on the criteria. Do automated reviews count? I set up build+test via GH actions and have GitHub run them on PR's. And make all changes through PR's. This not only prevents "forgot to run tests" type accidents during regular development, it also helps me when I come back to a hobby project months later, and it lets me confidently do small changes (think version bumps) directly through GitHub's editor, which saves a bunch of time. And when, against the odds, I actually do get a contribution, the infra is already there and it really cuts down my turnaround time to get it merged, bump the version and deploy the release. Of course if a single direct push yields you the badge then I guess pretty much every solo dev gets it sooner or later. But that indirectly turns it back into a good badge, right? "Independent enough to have a life outside a standardized corporate process"?
- bastardoperator 4y agoActions can still provide the feedback even without a PR if you trigger on push, you just don't have a gate like PR for contribution. I do similar to what you're describing and would recommend a feedback loop for build/test 100% of the time. I just don't think merging without review equates is an absolute negative depending on the situation, in this case no reviewers exist outside of myself and from my perspective this is how a lot projects start, someone just goes for it and starts committing! Yolo...
- michaelanckaert 4y agoCan we please stop turning everything into a social media experience? Why the constant need for personal validation / ego gratification? It seems like almost every tool or platform these days needs a friends feature, bragging badges or other form of social validation.
- cglong 4y agoTo be fair, GitHub's original slogan was "Social Coding".
- s3tz 4y agoTrue, but why do people think they need validation to collaborate?
- lawgimenez 4y agoStackoverflow also has badges and it motivated me a lot to answer questions on the early days.
- CobrastanJorji 4y agoIt's because people often need validation to collaborate.
- akerl_ 4y agoMaybe this is a hot take, but… I like being validated? It feels good to receive positive feedback, and a ton of my life is structured to ensure positive feedback loops for things I want to incentivize myself to do. I’ve definitely contributed more PRs during Hacktoberfest to get a t-shirt. I’ve done Strava runs when I might have otherwise skipped a day and been excited to see a new achievement.
- gjsman-1000 4y agoHere's my hot take. I work for a small company, I'm the solo programmer. Our company's code is important, so it's all private. I work full-time and it is stressful enough, and don't have interest in working longer. Because I'm solo, I don't need Pull Requests for my own work, among other things that a team needs. Under this system, I get no badges. I appear as though I have nothing to show. Even though I have arguably done more and been responsible for more than many people with badges have. That's irritating.
- take_it_not 4y agoCan’t wait for more ppl making random bullsh*t PR just to earn these badges lol
- EscargotCult 4y agoReminds me of the Stack Overflow profile badges, which themselves were inspired by Xbox achievements.
- kertoip_1 4y agoStack Overflow badges are IMO the best example of how such feature should be done. They all make up a great summary of all actions that are considered to be useful in community. They are encouraging to raise flags, upvote questions, visit website regularly. You can quickly learn features that you haven't tried yet from "Next badge" section in your profile. They are just encouraging learning about how website operates in a fun way.
- thenerdhead 4y agoWhy though? On one hand, yes it's fun and brings entertainment to the platform. On the other hand, I don't really want a badge showing I sometimes "YOLO" merging code like it's an achievement or something. It's not the achievement you think it is, even if it's a common meme for people new to the industry. It leaves a breadcrumb trail of bad practices that are sometimes out of necessity.
- bastardoperator 4y agoWhy not? You've never had a personal project or repo you've committed to without reviewers?
- thenerdhead 4y agoAll the time, but not in public repos. Do look at the feature. It is only associated for public/OSS repos.
- agluszak 4y agoI'm afraid this feature will lead to a proliferation of low quality contributions - just like Hacktoberfest. It's saddening that GH is turning more and more into a gamified social network (the new "for you" feed).
- nvr219 4y agoWhat a totally useless focus from GitHub.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- no_wizard 4y agoI don't mind this, in a sense its cool because some OSS projects can use this as a way to honor key contributors publicly in ways that are "obvious". I'm thinking also its a way to earn yourself some credibility on your resume beyond just showing your contribution graph in a way that is easily digested (re: quickly). With that said, and I know GitHub is big and lots of people are working on lots of things, however I feel like whatever energy went into this could have possibly been spent on making the UI more responsive and less wonky. For instance, I still continue to run into issues when opening PR links from the Slack integration where it won't load the CI status correctly, I have to refresh the page every time. I love GitHub, and I'm not someone who is trying to harsh anyone, and I think this is kind of cool for what it is, however there are many long standing UI / UX issues make this landing a little less exciting.
- damsta 4y agoThere are so many other things they could invest time on and they decided to spend it profile badges...
- popcorncowboy 4y agoThis is not stupid. It's not a waste of time. It doesn't matter if this leads to a proliferation of shit contributions. It doesn't matter if it encourages bad practices. It doesn't matter if you don't like it. It's smart. This is WHY Microsoft bought Github. Software is eating the world and Github is where most of the eating happens. There are many career paths that require you to live on Twitter or LinkedIn or whatever. If Github pulls off the bigger play here it won't matter what Gitlab or Bitbucket or anyone else ever tries because you will HAVE to be on Github. This is how a trillion dollar company gets its return on GH.
- solatic 4y agoPrecisely. LinkedIn doesn't specialize in software, it's a glorified résumé database. We all know that résumés don't really tell you whether an engineer is going to do good work for you; if they did, the only purpose of engineering interviews would be for culture fit. At the same time, even if all of an engineer's contributions were fully in the open and linked to from their GitHub profile, it's all a bit too much for a hiring manager to parse per résumé that they receive. Achievements is a way of distilling contributions down to the important questions that hiring managers have: just how senior is this person I'm interviewing anyway? If I hire this person to do cutting-edge work, are they the kind of person to interact with the community on pushing the state-of-the-art, or not?
- anarticle 4y agoI think you are riding a horse that is driven by a cart :D. Rather than looking at github from the perspective of hiring managers, look at it from the perspective of users. If the feature does not seem to serve them, it might not be a good one. If github is a tool, then the words hiring manager probably shouldn't appear. I don't think of "what will my product person think?" when I use grep. Also, didn't we do this when the award was tshirts for commits to open source projects where it unleashed a firestorm of junk edits to projects? If SNR gets low enough, people will migrate. I know some people have left github for gitlab, and are having a whale of a time with their runners etc. Replacing junky old jenkins installs for in the fence CICD.
- Liquidor 4y agoI like this feature. I understand that it's not for everyone, but I also feel like people here tend to forget that GitHub is a social coding/collaboration platform as well. If you didn't like these features, why are your projects on GitHub then? Plenty of other git solutions. I see some comments worried about this feature being abused or misused in regards to "bad contributions" however those contributions would either just be rejected, as they should, or accepted by the maintainers which means the badges worked to begin with, promoting more open-source collaboration.
- prepend 4y ago> If you didn't like these features, why are your projects on GitHub then Because it also works really well for solo projects or private projects. I chose GitHub many years ago not because they were social but because they were free and accessible. The competitors at the time were sourceforge and Google code and neither of them were as easy to use or simple. I use GitHub in spite of its dumb social features, not because of it. This reminds me of the “if you don’t love guns, why do you live in America, gtfo” people are complicated and have multiple, sometimes conflicting, motivations.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jackomelon 4y agoSounds pretty cool. I like the “discovery by surprise” approach.
- substation13 4y agoI enjoy StackOverflow badges and I think this could be fun.
- jreynoldsdev 4y agoI'm surprised how much negative reaction there is to this, what gives? I'm a sucker for a good product shtick and love these badges.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dandellion 4y agoThey have a lot of downtime, so I guess it's good they're adding features like this that compensate for it.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jerryjerryjerry 4y agoThis is a fun project, however, what values can it provide besides fancy "social coding"? There are tons of information with github, and how to dig out the values behind sounds more meaningful to me.
- jerryjerryjerry 4y agoI'm thinking about a website that exploit insights from the github data might be more useful, like this one: https://ossinsight.io/ https://ossinsight.io/ , which can allow project owners, developers, or even investors to find out the project trends, activities, or even popularity in certain regions/countries.
- karol 4y agoLooks woke
- Shadonototra 4y agogood thing i moved away from github, what a poorly managed company
- dancemethis 4y agoThere should be a badge with a very... on-point graphic, for people who contribute to software used in ICE, the US-based concentration camps.
- bearjaws 4y agoMeanwhile GitLab 15 just launched with features that actually help devs...
- tills13 4y agoSuch as? And are these features that GH already has in some capacity?
- bearjaws 4y agoAdvanced Search is compatible with OpenSearch (GH did add this recently) Plan and schedule issues with automated iteration cadences (great for recurring annual tasks) Container Scanning available in all tiers (already very easy to add container scanning in enterprise, but now available for free everywhere, have to use a third party action in github) Project-level Secure Files in open beta (missing from github) Semgrep-based SAST (in addition to their existing SAST & DAST, something github lacks natively) Approve deployments from the Environments page (GitHubs approval flows are enterprise only) Improvements to Terraform registry -- GitLab is already well beyond the feature set of GitHub, you should give it a look sometime. Things that immediately jump out to me: 1. Security Dashboards 2. Kubernetes Integration (automated test environments) 3. SAST / DAST / OSS license checks / compliance frameworks 4. Feature Toggles using unleash (hosted by Gitlab) 5. More robust project planning, way beyond 'issues'. 6. Can read in results from unit testing / cypress without adding additional plugins 7. Can send alarms from your observability platform of choice to indicate release health 8. OpenFaaS support
- tills13 4y agoThis is noise at best. I appreciate them trying -- how much can you actually change github to be a better product? This just feels like a manager or team creating work for themselves.
- hk1337 4y agoBadges? We don’t need no stinking’ badges.
- chimen 4y agoNext killer feature: preferred pronouns on profile. /s
- coryw 4y agoThis is fun.
- evanmoran 4y agoI know this is supposed to be fun, but I’m also mixed on it as so much of my work is in private repositories. This means that these badges are like “privacy leaks” from my closed source work to my public GitHub profile. I suspect this is why this discussion is getting so negative as GitHub is not a social fun place for us anymore, it’s the place we work everyday with coworkers and managers. So in general please GitHub be less gamified and social as I don’t want to have to constantly monitor privacy settings (like at FB) and instead focus on what we all want: replacing Jira and streamlining containers / CI :)
- jaywalk 4y agoIt sounds like these badges will only come from public commits, and you can also turn them off. So I don't think your concern is warranted.
- sodality2 4y agoIt has given me badges for PR's in private repositories, it just doesn't display what repo or any additional information (listed as "inaccessible")
- mkl95 4y agoSome people are making $300000+ a year working on these features. Think about it for a minute.
- yellowapple 4y agoPower to 'em.
- russh 4y agoSounds like nice work if you can get it.
- npteljes 4y agoWhat are your thoughs on it?
- mkl95 4y agoIt seems like easy money compared to other Github projects. Actions looks like a garbage fire full of unsolved problems, for example. But I'm not sure how good it is to work on such a project for a long time in terms of career growth. Telling your next potential employers your body of work at Github is a Badge CRUD sounds pretty underwhelming.
- npteljes 4y agoIf it's underwhelming, phrase it differently - like working on "GitHub's new reward system".
- Zababa 4y agoI currently have "Pull Shark" for having made pull requests that have been merged. This works on my own repos, I'm not sure if this is intended.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jansan 4y agoTo those of you not in favor of this new feature, you can opt out by unchecking Settings -> Public Profile (at the bottom) -> Show Achievements on my profile I just did this.
- woodruffw 4y agoI have lukewarm feelings about this. On one hand, I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with additional badges -- I thought the first two (the Mars Rover and "code vault" ones) were pretty interesting, and told an interesting story. On the other hand, these feel much more gamified: I don't know what "YOLO" or "Pull Shark" is supposed to mean to me when I see it on someone's profile. And this is coming from someone who really likes the other social aspects of GitHub: I like seeing people's commit timeline, pull histories, &c. IMO, the failure here is not in concept, but in execution. Rewards and validation are nice; I'd like to see GitHub reach a bit higher with them.
- yuuta 4y ago
- ravish0007 4y agoYou have unlocked "Gang Buster" for tagging 40k people. Congratulations!
- stunt 4y agoThe behavior you reward is the behavior you get. What is the value of encouraging low quality contributions? Very soon, you will be able to buy GitHub profiles with a lot of badges and followers I guess.
- bennyschmidt 4y agoThe "Pull Shark" one is my least favorite, I don't like when developers use their PR count as some kind of achievement, it's probably the most toxic metric (lol) but seriously, it's toxic. People do all kinds of evil, sabotogy things to preserve their contribution and PR count, and too many CTOs have admitted to me that's all they look at. Now you know why some kids are pushing 25 [pointless] PRs per day haha. It was never about code quality or productivity! What Code Climate is doing- I would love to see GitHub badges around that. Give me a badge because I pair unit tests with React components, or because I wrote something in an elegant way. That would actually be cool/useful. It would require that GitHub hires good devs though haha! Good devs at a major tech company - that will NEVER happen.
- Ava433 4y ago