What is “Top Badgers”?

“Top Badgers” is a special series on the Fedora Community Blog for 2015. In this series, we interviewed some of the top badge earners of 2015 in the Fedora Project. Not familiar with Fedora badges? No worries, you can read more about them on the Badges website.

This article features Major Hayden (mhayden), who clocked in at the #3 spot of badges earned in 2015, with an astonishing 48 badges! As of the writing of this article, Major is the #42 all-time badge earner in Fedora.

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

I’m the type of person that loves checklists, so earning badges is always fun for me. The most memorable badge from 2015 was the “Flock 2015 Speaker” because it was my first trip to a Flock event (although I was at FUDCon in Tempe!) and I did my first keynote presentation there. It was an awesome experience and I really enjoyed the opportunity to meet so many people.

Two of my miscellaneous badges are quite memorable, too. “The Blessing of the FPL” was a nice surprise (thanks to Robyn Bergeron for that) and the “Heartbleed Buster” badge speaks for itself. I’ll be glad if I can avoid dealing with anything like Heartbleed ever again.

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

Most of the badges related to profile updates were fairly easy to get. For example, adding in my local time zone, SSH key, and Yubikey to my Fedora account was an easy way to snag some badges. Some of the easy ones introduced me to features and applications that I didn’t know existed! As an example, I discovered Fedora’s vacation calendar while I tried to get the “Vacation” badge. Another example was package tagging — I wasn’t aware that the Fedora Tagger was available!

Some of the hardest ones involved a lot of ongoing work. The “Blog Lobber (Planet VI)” badge required 80 Fedora-related posts on Fedora Planet and it took quite a while to achieve. It took a lot of package testing and feedback to get the “Both Bull and Self Transcended (Tester VIII)” badge, too.

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

When people ask me about badges, I tell them to look over the community badge list first. Many of those help you find helpful applications within the Fedora community or they show you things you can do with your Fedora account. The next step for some people may be to look into the packaging-related badges. For example, anyone can test packages and provide feedback, whether they package software or not. That’s a gateway drug to building packages in COPR or maintaining official packages in Fedora!