Introducing Badgie

As I left Toptal, I got two weeks of paid leave and decided to use them to try and build a small web venture that had the potential to be cool. As I explained this to a few friends, I realized the idea could work. A few friends generously volunteered their extra nights, and we went on to work.

In the last blog post on sustainable feedback, I made a point on how bad we are about giving positive feedback to developers at a systemic level.

The sad reality is that when we measure the amount of positive reinforcement that all developers receive against the avalanche of automatically generated negative feedback, the negative side dominates pretty much everywhere.

I concluded with a promise (or was it a warning πŸ˜‰?)

The current practices are not sustainable as a whole. In the next post I am going to detail what I want to do about it, so keep tuned!

Today, I'm happy to disclose a little more of what we have been building: a tool called Badgie. Badgie monitors the internet for examples of "good behaviors" of developers and rewards them with achievements.

That's it. You can think of Badgie as a cross between Stack Overflow, Hacker Rank and GitHub.

useful diagram

As a proof-of-concept, we have found 823,000 examples worth rewarding and we have only implemented six primary achievements. There are tons of unrecognized goodness out there!

How does Badgie work for developers?

  1. You, a developer, sign up!
  2. You can link your account to some of the development platforms we know, and you frequent, like GitHub or Stack Overflow.
  3. We award achievements to you based on this knowledge πŸ₯‡!
  4. You can use the achievement system as a reward system to guide your career. Perhaps you'd like to get a badge for contributing to an open source project πŸ˜‰?
  5. You can also use the achievements to compare yourself to other people by following them.
  6. You can see our top users of the month, week or year to see where you rank in the world.
  7. You also have a way of sharing your profile to your friends to show off if you so choose.
  8. If you decide to enable them, you can receive notifications of your awards.

What badges are we considering?

For now, we have only implemented simple badges, for achieving a reputation on Stack Overflow and for contributing to important Open Source projects on GitHub. In general, at a philosophical level, the achievements will be awarded for ...achieving stuff that matters and not for merely following recipes.

That's the basic idea. Of course, execution is a whole other matter!

Therefore, I am writing this to ask you to share your feedback with us. We want to do this right, to be a reputable, impartial site that is recognized by all, but most importantly that you find suitable.

In the next blog post, I'll address any feedback received, report on progress and add more details!

When is this going to be released?

Soon, 6-8 weeks. In the meanwhile, keep informed by subscribing to our RSS feed or to the Badgie announcement list:

Please discuss and upvote the post on HN


The Side Note

We considered calling this badger, but the meme drove us crazy!


Hi, I'm Marco Cecconi. I am the founder of Intelligent Hack, developer, hacker, blogger, conference lecturer. Bio: ex Stack Overflow core team, ex Toptal EM.

Read more

Newest Posts

What can Stack Overflow learn from ChatGPT?

Stack Overflow could benefit from adopting a using conversational AI to provide specific answers

Read more
Fan mail

Multiple people with my name use my email address and I can read their email, chaos ensues!

Read more
Intelligent Trip

After years of building, our top-notch consultancy to help start-ups and scale-ups create great, scalable products, I think it is high time I added an update to how it is going and what's next for us.

Read more
Guest blog: Building, in partnership with communities by Shog9

A lesson in building communities by Stack Overflow's most prominent community manager emeritus, Shog9

Read more
Can you migrate a company from on-premise to remote-only?

Some lessons learned over the past 8 years of remote work in some of the best remote companies on the planet

Read more

Gleanings

And the Most Realistic Developer in Fiction is...
Julia Silge • Mar 28, 2017

We can say that Mr. Robot is having a moment. The main character was one of the top choices and thus is perhaps the most/least realistic/annoying/inspiring portrayal of what it’s like to be a computer programmer today.

Read more…