

Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard - Slimy
http://www.geekwire.com/2012/coding-fun-microsofts-visual-studio-badges-leaderboard

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brianwillis
A quick look at the list:

\- Field Master: Have 100 fields in a single class.

\- Overload: More than 10 overloads of a method.

\- Potty Mouth: Use 5 different curse words in a file.

These are funny, but they miss what achievements are good for - encouraging
new users to adopt good behaviours.

~~~
kmm
Do notice that these achievements give exactly 0 points. They're not
discouraging bad behaviour, but not exactly encouraging it either.

~~~
lux
Still encourages in the sense of wanting to obtain all of them, which can be
pretty powerful, although I'm sure anyone would just do those for jokes (you
could even write a script to win those achievements for you! :).

If I saw achievements in my text editor though, I'd feel it's a bit
patronizing personally. What I want in new releases is to help me do my work
faster and better, anything else just gets in the way.

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shaggyfrog
This ongoing trend of "gamification" is starting to drive me up the wall.
Seems like some brainiac in marketing won some battle to sink their claws into
the VS team. And I feel bad for them, because I'd hope they'd want to be
spending their team actually improving VS (which is still an excellent IDE)
instead of adding a layer of crapola lipstick.

What next -- achievements for the taskbar?

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contextfree
This was not done by the VS team. It is an extension developed by members of
the Channel 9 team inspired by this post on someone's blog ->
[http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-
had-...](http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-
achievements/) , and the associated Reddit thread.

~~~
shaggyfrog
My mistake, then. And thank goodness. Full ignominy goes to those guys, then.

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Tossrock
Oh man, someone actually did this? I remember reading a hilarious thread about
this a year ago. [http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-
had-...](http://blog.whiletrue.com/2011/01/what-if-visual-studio-had-
achievements/)

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ry0ohki
Gamification: The shark has officially been jumped.

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angrycoder
That is pretty funny.

Reminds me of the time I was working on a .net project and the lead developer
wired up a call in the OnApplicationError method to log the machine name
origin of each error to a database. Every week he would hand out an award to
the person with the most errors.

The interesting part was when he did the same thing for the bug tracker, the
list was inverted. Those with more errors in development had fewer bugs in QA.

~~~
bunderbunder
Thinking back on all the colleagues I've had who seemed to believe that
'debugging' is just another word for 'getting it to compile', that inverse
relationship does not surprise me at all.

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fosk
I would like to see something like this in Eclipse.

~~~
larsberg
Of course, the Java equivalents would be slightly different. For example,
"More than 4 pattern names in a single class identifier."

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endianswap
I don't understand the leaderboard aspect of it because, if I'm reading the
article correctly, each of the achievements is a one-off, which means that the
leaderboard will quickly be dominated with a few developers who happened to
hit all of the achievements.

~~~
kristiandupont
Also, a lot of these rely on analysis of the code. In that case, will every
team member who has the code checked out receive every award that is unlocked
by the project?

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InclinedPlane
These seem to be sending mixed messages. Some of these very much seem to be
lampooning certain negative behaviors, some of them seem to be encouraging
certain positive behaviors. Overall it seems to be ridiculous and an unhelpful
distraction.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Check out the icon and the point scoring for the lampooning badges: zero
points and a picture of a guy running with scissors.

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ronbeltran
I couldn't find the badge for "negative code". They should give it the highest
point.

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WalterBright
We doan need no steeenkin' badges!

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fs111
github has this for month: <http://coderwall.com/>

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frankPants
Wow. Thanks Microsoft for cluttering up yet another product with more UI
Craptastic.

Honestly I know it's all done in fun but really, people using the product are
trying to concentrate, they're trying to solve really hard problems and you're
going to pop up some crap telling them they achieved some stupid "award".

You morons, this is akin to the marketing joker in the office that annoys alls
the programmers by interrupting them all day with stupid jokes, you know the
guy, he's the one you want to punch in the face everyday.

And to the guys that actually coded this up, learn to say no. Put your job on
the line; fuck it it's not worth making the world a worse place by adding this
kinda crap to a developer tool.

~~~
neilparikh
It's not part of the IDE itself. It's a plugin you have to go out of your way
to install.

