
Git-achievements: Earn geeky merit badges while learning Git - pufuwozu
http://thechangelog.com/post/1200486354/git-achievements-aquire-achievements-while-using-git
======
icefox
Git-achievements was a lot of fun to make. Lots of laughs coming up with the
various "achievements" you get to unlock with various people on #startups. For
the curious I wrote up a blog post on it when I first put it up:
[http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/03/git-
achievements....](http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/03/git-
achievements.html)

The unexpected has to be how useful it has been in showing off how easy it is
to add commands to git, getting a laugh when giving presentations on learning
Git and how every few weeks someone tells me about it.

Big thanks to the github guys for gh-pages. It is really a hidden killer
feature of github. Rather than a master branch there is only a gh-pages branch
which is what makes publishing achievements to easy for anyone to do. It makes
dumping up little js apps/tests/examples in a git repo online really easy such
as these other two repos: <http://github.com/icefox/js_email_link_hack>
<http://github.com/icefox/javascript_genetic_algorithm>

------
lehmannro
_shameless plug_ I have been working on a similar thing in the last few days:
<http://github.com/lehmannro/commithero>

It's based on the commit history rather than local actions and should work on
Git, Subversion, Mercurial, and Bazaar. I am still low on achievements (about
half a dozen implemented) but tried to make the API for third-party
achievements _as easy as possible_ ; patches welcome!

------
wccrawford
I'll admit it, I love cheevos. And I feel an odd compulsion to install this.
But something makes me not want to add in a game into my work, even if it's
work I do at home, for myself.

~~~
riffraff
"long time" git-achievements user (half a year I guess?) here.

You should not be worried, while in the first couple of days you may get a
boatload of achievements that kind of make you interrupt your stream of
codingness (but it's ok since they are a new toy), g-a fades out pretty fast
in the background.

------
CWIZO
I had a similar idea a while ago. But I was thinking on a global scale, you
would earn points/badges for actions you take in git. And then there would be
a website where you could see how productive you are compared to other
developers around the world.

What do you think?

------
tomjen3
Am I the only one who whould be actively turned against learning Git because
of these "merit badges"? It just seems like another of those gold stars they
gave you in grade school...

~~~
pufuwozu
You don't have to use it.

------
jarin
This makes me want to add achievements to Ruby Koans: <http://rubykoans.com/>

Although the Zen masters would probably frown on that.

~~~
newsisan
Sounds like an alright idea. One thing, is there any chance of fixing the
font? It looks all rough for me on Win7 x64, using Chrome 6 (same issue in
Safari).

------
jrockway
I love it when the Ruby community discovers a tool that a few kernel hackers
wrote over a long weekend.

