Git-achievements: Earn geeky merit badges while learning Git

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: <a href="http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/03/git-achievements.html" rel="nofollow">http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2010/03/git-achievements....</a><p>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.<p>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: <a href="http://github.com/icefox/js_email_link_hack" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/icefox/js_email_link_hack</a> <a href="http://github.com/icefox/javascript_genetic_algorithm" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/icefox/javascript_genetic_algorithm</a>

<i>shameless plug</i> I have been working on a similar thing in the last few days: <a href="http://github.com/lehmannro/commithero" rel="nofollow">http://github.com/lehmannro/commithero</a><p>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 <i>as easy as possible</i>; patches welcome!

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.

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.<p>What do you think?

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...

This makes me want to add achievements to Ruby Koans: <a href="http://rubykoans.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rubykoans.com/</a><p>Although the Zen masters would probably frown on that.

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