What is “Top Badgers”?

“Top Badgers” is a special series on the Community Blog. In this series, Luis Roca interviewed the top badge earners of 2017 in the Fedora Project. Not familiar with Fedora Badges? No worries, you can read more about them on the Badges website.

This article features Fabio Valentini (decathorpe), who clocked in at the #3 spot of badges earned in 2017, with 34 badges! As of the writing of this article, Fabio is the #222 all-time badge earner in Fedora.

“You earned a lot of badges this year. For you, what was the most memorable badge and why?”

That would be the “All your $arch are belong to us (Koji Success V)” badge. Partly because I think that the badge title is one of the funniest. On the other hand, getting more than 1000 successful Koji builds required about three successful builds per day until that point in time, and I didn’t even realize that I was that busy building packages.

“Of the badges you earned this year, which one did you think was easiest?”

The easiest badge was probably the “Tadpole” badge, because you get that one for just having an FAS account long enough (three years, in that case). Since I don’t think that should count here, the “Override, you say?” badge was probably the easiest to get.

“Hardest?”

I guess “Like a Rock (Updates-Stable IV)” was the hardest one to achieve, since it involved the most work – preparing an update, testing it locally, building it in Koji, submitting it to Bodhi, gathering feedback, pushing it to stable, etc. takes quite a lot of time.

“What is your advice to either new or recent contributors who want to earn more badges?”

I don’t think gathering badges should be a standalone goal, but for the sake of the argument, there are some low hanging fruit:

  • Building some packages in COPR gets you 2-3 badges.
  • The same goes for building stuff in koji (successful and failed) builds both, although submitting failing builds just for the sake of getting the badge should be frowned upon).
  • Submitting karma for updates gets you another 4-5 quick badges.
  • Contributing to and voting in the supplemental wallpaper contests is awarded by (at least) 4 badges per year. More if your entry wins. 😉

“Any tips to success?”

Just do the work, and you’ll probably gather more badges than you realize.

“What are you currently working on in the Fedora Project?”

I am the (sole) maintainer of the elementary/Pantheon DE packages in Fedora. I own and co-maintain around 40 golang packages, and I am the maintainer of the syncthing package. I also provide “unofficial official” COPR repositories for stable builds of elementary packages that aren’t quite ready for the official Fedora repos, and for nightly builds of all elementary packages. As part of that I’m working with – and contributing to – the upstream elementary projects.

“What can the community look forward to from you in 2018?”

I hope that I can improve the stability and “smoothness” of the Pantheon DE on Fedora. The stabilization being done upstream for the upcoming “5.0 Juno” release of elementaryOS will probably help me achieve that. I’m also looking forward to update and clean my golang packages with the newly added packaging helpers for golang, which – I hope – will reduce the maintenance burden of those packages (and, as a result, syncthing) quite a bit.