Ha, git it!? This summer GitHub began rolling out achievements for all the public and private contributions you make. For each achievement you earn, you receive a small, beautifully animated, colorful badge on the left side of your profile. They don’t mean much yet and the few that have rolled out are fairly easy to git. Nevertheless, GitHub promises to roll out more achievements as they continue developing the feature.
Existing Achievements (previously, “Badges”) Prior to this update, achievements were called “Badges” and there were only 3 available for display on your profile.
Arctic Code Vault Contributed code to repositories in the 2020 GitHub Archive Program. This badge is actually pretty cool. If you had public repositories that hadn’t been opted out in 2020, you code was encoded and printed on a long-lasting film reel. Those film reels were then packed and stored deep in the arctic permafrost for future generations. Much like the Global Seed Bank, code contributed to this program now lives, indefinitely, preserved for future generations (especially in the event of some great catastrophe).
This achievement is no longer unlockable.
Mars 2020 Contributor Contributed code to repositories used in the Mars 2020 Helicopter Mission. Also a very very cool badge. If you contributed to any of the open-source dependencies NASA’s JPL lab used to build the systems for their 2020 Mars Helicopter Mission, you’ll receive this badge. And, if you have it, hats off to you — what a fantastic contribution to humanity.
This achievement is no longer unlockable.
Public Sponsor This one’s pretty straightforward. You’ll unlock it as soon as you’re sponsoring open source work via GitHub Sponsors.
New Achievements There are now six new achievements you can earn and unlock for display on your profile. Plus, each achievement has multiple tiers from Bronze to Silver to Gold.
Pair Extraordinaire Coauthored in a merged pull request
Tiers
Bronze: Coauthor 10 merged PRs
Silver: Coauthor 24 merged PRs
Gold: Coauthor 48 merged PRs
Quickdraw Closed an issue or a pull request within 5 minutes of opening
No tiers for this achievement.
Starstruck achievement art Starstruck Created a repository that has at least 16 stars
Tiers
Bronze: Created a repo with 128 stars
Silver: Created a repo with 512 stars
Gold: Created a repo with 4096 stars
Galaxy brain achievement art Galaxy Brain Have 2 answers marked as accepted on GitHub discussions.
Tiers
Bronze: 8 accepted answers
Silver: 16 accepted answers
Gold: 32 accepted answers
Pull shark achievement art Pull Shark Merged at least 2 pull requests.
Tiers
Bronze: 16 merged PRs
Silver: 128 merged PRs
Gold: 1024 merged PRs
YOLO achievement art YOLO Merged a pull request without code review.
No tiers for this achievement.
Final Thoughts Achievements are fun (I can be a bit of an achievement-perfectionist myself), so its nice to see a little pizzaz added to our profiles. Plus, the achievement art is setup to match your emoji skin tone color (nice!). Do any of the new achievements mean anything worthwhile? Nope (except for maybe Starstruck), but maybe they will in the future as more hard-to-get achievements roll out.