What's badges should we have in Exercism

[iHiD]

In V3 we're introducing badges - things that you can get/unlock for achieving certain things. They'll appear on your profile to show off things you've done, and you can choose your favourite badge to appear next to your name around the site. Other than that they're entirely meaningless and just for fun. We'll probably show how common/rare they are etc.

What badges would you like to see? Some simple examples to get us started:

• Completed Ruby Concepts (eg "Ruby Learner")
• Completed Ruby Track (eg "Ruby Master")
• Mentored 100 people (eg "Mentoring Master")
• Mentored 1000 people (eg "Mentoring Royalty")
• Track Maintainer
• V1 member
• V2 member

Open to all and any ideas :)

[SaschaMann]

• Solve at least one exercise a day X days in a row
• Submit a {docs|exercise creation|testsuite update} PR
• Review more than X PRs
• Open more than X issues
• Submit more than X iterations for one exercise
• Find a bug in an exercise and report it
• Create an exercise from scratch
• Livestream solving an exercise

In video games I tend to find completely unexpected and arbitrary achievements quite amusing. Take these suggestions with more than just a grain of salt:

• Counterspy: Change a privacy preference
• Manage to submit a PR that passes all checks on first try
• Submit a solution after being inactive for X days, X > 6 months
• Night Owl: Submit a solution after midnight (but before ~5-6am)
• Find a bug in the programming language/implementation while solving an exercise and report it
• Code golf: Reduce the length of a solution by more than X% relative to the first iteration

[BethanyG]

OMG. LOVE the arbitrary ones! YES to those!

Some more:

• Managed to collect more than X number of emoji on a post in Slack
• More than two lines of iterations on an exercise (so more than 10, I think?)

[BethanyG]

• Longest (friendly) debate on a submitted PR

[SaschaMann]

• Suggest a badge that is added to the website

[ignlg]

Arbitrary ones are a must. In my personal experience, they are the most engaging ones. Some ideas:

• Early Bird: Submit a solution before breakfast (~6am, local time).
• Coffee Rush: Submit N solutions in a single day.

I tend to love those that combine factors / actions / events:

• Hello World: Start a track, submit a solution and be approved in less than T time.
• Back In Town: Login after T time without activity and earn a 5 stars rating the very same day.
• Starting Strong: Submit a solution on January 1st.

[iHiD]

I normally have breakfast at about 11am... :D

[JesseSingleton]

• On the mentoring metrics I think something like 100, 250, 500, 1000 perhaps? I believe you mentioned that some people had almost hit 10,000??
• Hackathon badges if there are more planned!
• It's a bit boring but time based - 1 year, 2 year etc.
• Streaks - for both mentors and users.

Side note - V1 member should definitely be the old devil logo 😈

[kotp]

Don't forget:

• First time mentoring an exercise
  • Got your toes wet!
• First time having one of your exercises mentored through completion.
  • Was that so bad?
• Appreciated, and it feels so good!
  • First 5 star rating from student for mentored exercise
• Bowing out
  • First time you leave a conversation

[BethanyG]

• Mentored first person ("Mentoring Minion")
• First Testimonial for Mentoring ("Praiseworthy")
• First 10 Testimonials for Mentoring ("Influencer")
• Mentored first 25 ("Mentoring Aficionado")
• Mentored first 100 ("Mentoring Expert")
• Mentored first 200 ("Mentoring Artisan")
• Mentored first 1000 (don't like Royalty, but Deity is problematic too)
• First Contribution to Repo

[BethanyG]

• Tag some exercises as "easter egg" exercises (at random, or of a certain difficulty level, or....??) - when a student completes these, they get special 1-time easter egg badges.

• Tag some student solutions as "easter egg" solutions - when a mentor completes mentoring these, they get a special 1-time easter egg badges.

• Founders day | V1 day | V2 day | V3 day badges - if you're logged in and mentoring or solving during these, you get a special badge.

• Contributed to an Analyzer ("Analytical")

• Main author on an Analyzer

• Contributed to a test runner ("Suspicious Mind")

• Main author on a test runner

• Contributed to a Representer ("Representative")

• Main author on a Representer

[neenjaw]

• X practice exercises complete
• X practice exercises mentor approved
• Made a friend (preferred by a mentor / preferred by a submitter)
• polyglot awards (attempted x languages to some measure)
• some persistence aware (something to reward stick-to-it-ness and growth with revisions)

[BethanyG]

X practice exercises complete

... wax on, wax off

[angelikatyborska]

• "[language] Superstar" - one of your solutions for any exercise in a given language received at least X (20? 30? 50?) stars.

• "Neverending Story" - submitted at least 10 iterations to the same exercise, no duplicates.

• "All your base are belong to us" - solved the "All Your Base" exercise.

• "Slow poke" - replied to a comment more than 30 days after the last activity for the given exercise.

[kotp]

Some I have seen have hit 20... 10 (iterations) can be fairly common.

[BethanyG]

Die unendliche Geschichte - and the badge can be the dragon from the movie:

https://www.syfy.com/sites/syfy/files/styles/1140x640_hero/public/neverending-story.jpg

[neenjaw]

I think related to @SaschaMann's thoughts about them seeming spontaneous -- It would be an interesting feature to not have them listed, but instead awarded when the condition is triggered. That way might prevent some of the gaming behaviours where people submit hot garbage just to collect all of the badges. I think dev.to does something like this where the badges are mostly mysterious until you get one.

If then concerned about discoverability, it could be relatively simple to trigger the first few, raising awareness of their existence but mysterious as to what will trigger the next badge.

[taiyab]

I envision having ones that even have ??? in the name/description so people have no clue how to get them, but know they exist.

[dougal]

Hide the novelties, make the progress or behaviour-encouraging badges visible.

[SleeplessByte]

HIDE ALL THE THINGS (but open source the software, lol)

[iHiD]

HIDE ALL THE THINGS (but open source the software, lol)

Yes. So Tai and I discussed this. I was like "someone is going to make a page listing all the badges, so we may as well make that page but just not put it anywhere near the actual list of badges you have".

[taiyab]

Or we could hash all the "hidden" ones and have the key in the V3 website repo? Although I think even that is open source...just no contributions...

[kotp]

• Mentored 20 per week for 3 weeks running
  • Cheering Section
• Completed 10 exercises in 1 week (Could be weighted to difficulty level of exercises)
  • On the fast track

[kotp]

On Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 07:54:13AM -0700, BethanyG wrote: * Mentored first 1000 (_don't like Royalty, but Deity is problematic too_)

* Mentored first 1000 ("Like a Boss")

[iHiD]

Update: Hating myself for all the code-writing this is going to generate for me :)

[WeeDom]

slightly menacing plastercine duck for 1000 mentorships?

[kotp]

• Having mentored thrice the quantity of exercises in a week that exceeds the "average required"
  • "Obsession"
• Having mentored thrice the quantity of exercises as above for n weeks
  • "Obsessed"

[joshgoebel]

More of these please, so I can win them all. :-)

[iHiD]

@SleeplessByte suggested to me that everything should be in the form of 2 ** n as we're programmers :)

[taiyab]

@yyyc514 I'm so sorry Josh. I'm contemplating doing a badge for completing every exercise on every track as a legendary tier.

[taiyab]

Getting more than 100 replies on a PR.

"Death by a thousand pecks"

[ErikSchierboom]

• "Share the love" (mentor a solution)
• Maybe paradigm-specific badges? E.g. "Functional Fanatic" for completing X number of functional languages
• "Exemplar" (have a solution with over 25 stars)
• "Doing it all" (mentor multiple tracks)

And perhaps some harder to quantify badges too:

• "Knowledgeable" (helped tons of students through chat)
• "Reviewer" (helped review PR's)
• "Make it Work" (helped fix bug(s))

[BethanyG]

"Make it Work" (helped fix bug(s))

....exterminator

[SaschaMann]

Maybe tracks could also define some exercises to unlock a badge. E.g. for completing a specific exercise that teaches a key paradigm of the language.

[kotp]

...._exterminator_

The Debuginator

[dougal]

• "Purgatory" - Write a solution which triggers an execution timeout.
• "First Contact" - Write a comment on someone else's solution.
• "Knuth Reward Cheque" - Report an error in an exercise.
• "Bill O'Reilly" - Live stream a solution (with or without bad language). Edit: Fuck this, thanks @SleeplessByte

[SleeplessByte]

(I would personally never want to get the rapist homo hating anti dutch badge, so maybe we use a different name for that last one 🙉 ❤️. I like the idea!!!)

[dougal]

Yikes. Wikipedia page is a treat for someone who only knows BOR from that one clip. Suggestion removed.

[iHiD]

lol

[taiyab]

@dougal I actually came up with the same idea for livestreaming a solution, but I called it "We'll do it live". :D

[ErikSchierboom]

• Lackadaisical: solve bob in five or more language
• Flawless: first iteration passes all the tests and has no feedback
• Command-liner: submit 10+ exercises through the CLI

[kotp]

On Wed, Jun 24, 2020 at 12:35:55PM +0000, Josh Goebel wrote: More of these please, so I can win them all. :-)

- Tantalizing - Anyone gets it after achieving n badges, unless it is Josh. Should keep him motivated to discover why he is missing one.

[iHiD]

Thanks everyone. I'm closing in favour of https://github.com/exercism/v3/blob/master/badges.md - follow the instructions there and we can discuss things on individual PRs. I tried to capture everything in this discussion in the bit at the bottom. The only bit I've left out is language-specific stuff or progress things (10 solutions, 50 solutions, etc) as those are probably going to be a different mechanism to badges. If I missed anything else when copying - sorry - please PR! :)

This is fun.