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 Robert Mayr (robyduck), who clocked in at the #4 spot of badges earned in 2015, with an astonishing 47 badges! As of the writing of this article, Robbie is the #10 all-time badge earner in Fedora.

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

Yes, seems I earned a lot this year! But the most memorable badge is difficult to pick up. There were several I remember. At Flock, I learned how to design a badge, what is needed and which kind of tools we have already to get them done. Designing one and earning a badge for it was really nice. For now, I made four: two are already deployed, another one is accepted, and the fourth is still under revision. Another one I remember is the Heartbleed badge. It’s also one of the most beautiful ones.

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

There are many easy badges. For example, the badges you get just for getting badges (e.g. 100 badges), when someone gives you karma, or when you vote for a wallpaper.

The hardest badges this year were submitting a cool wallpaper (not easy to find a good motive) or designing a nice badge. The trickiest one was probably a badge that normally is an easy one, because it had a bug and didn’t work. So I looked at the code and had to search for a while to find it, then I submitted a small fix which did the job. It was the “you can pry it from my cold dead hands” badge.

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

I’m not trying to get as many badges as I can, and could probably have some more if I did. This is probably the key for my success, if you want to call it like this, because it’s just fun for me.

If you are interested in getting many badges and want to do it quickly, you should contribute contribute contribute, in many areas. Packagers probably are able to get much more badges than other contributors, although that is not a must.

Another thing you should do if you want to earn badges is testing. We have ten badges for testing package updates on Bodhi and another four badges if you do some kernel testing. Furthermore, there are many, many badges for just doing one easy action (logging in, updating your password, adding a SSH key, etc.).

But at the end, you should not contribute or do stuff just for getting a badge. You should have fun with what you are doing. If you are able to get a badge for your activity, then it is perfect. Never compare it to a competition – that’s what badging is not. Continue contributing and have a lot of fun!