I also (don't) have my own achievables!

July 6, 2023 3:02 PM

Rejected GitHub Profile Achievements:

• Sith Lord: Wipe out someone else's commits by force pushing to the main branch.
• Tee Hee: In a single "minor cleanup" commit to the main branch, change every line of every file in the repository so that all open Pull Requests are unmergeable.
• Patient Skeleton: Submit a pull request to a public repository that fixes it, but its been open for at least 2 years.

Some more from the Hacker News thread:

• The Artist: posted a screenshot of a terminal instead of copy and pasting the text.
• Captain Obvious: Opens a very aggressive and angry issue about the project not installing, when the maintainer responds to double-check that you didn't miss a critical and well-documented note in the docs, you disappear, never to reply again.
• The Thief: When your approach to open source is that you close pull requests and merge the diff manually under your own name.

posted by genpfault (37 comments total)

So great! I will follow this project with VC-like interest.
posted by riverlife at 4:08 PM on July 6, 2023

the open source evangelist: be so explosively hostile toward a new contributor that they absolutely positively never contribute to any project ever again. your feedback should start with how bad their pr is but should eventually get around to focusing on how their misunderstanding of the architecture of your program indicates that they are unsuited not just for programming but indeed for life itself.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 4:10 PM on July 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

For those who don't get the "Log This" achievement, that particular version of Log4J has the infamous Log4Shell exploit that resulted in a lot of programmers around the world to have a very long weekend.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:14 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

The Pedant: submits a PR for over 100 files, all of which involve removing odd bits of white space or correcting punctuation, often incorrectly.
posted by 43rdAnd9th at 4:42 PM on July 6, 2023 [5 favorites]

The Artist: posted a screenshot of a terminal instead of copy and pasting the text.

I work on a team that handles tooling issues, and this is guaranteed to drive me up the fucking wall.
posted by NoxAeternum at 4:50 PM on July 6, 2023 [7 favorites]

> I work on a team that handles tooling issues, and this is guaranteed to drive me up the fucking wall.

I'd rather a screenshot of a text terminal or even a photo of the screen rather than "it said something about something happening, or not happening, in some other thing and there was a big number? I think it started with 8, or maybe A. This is on a computer, or maybe it was my phone. Very urgent, this software is useless to me unless this is fixed immediately."
posted by nickzoic at 5:47 PM on July 6, 2023 [15 favorites]

The Enigma Machine: Communicate a critical defect via a cellphone photo of a computer screen showing, among other things, the application in question, a browser with 20+ tabs running, and an email client with its Inbox displayed, all pasted into a Powerpoint slide which is inexplicably embedded into a Word document, uploaded to Sharepoint, and then communicated via a link which requires a login to download.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:50 PM on July 6, 2023 [13 favorites]

Perfect timing! I took down production yesterday was asking the senior if I get a badge.
posted by iamck at 9:24 PM on July 6, 2023 [1 favorite]

Can you receive the “procrastinator” one more than once? because uh
posted by atoxyl at 10:08 PM on July 6, 2023 [2 favorites]

detached HEAD of Vecna
posted by away for regrooving at 1:10 AM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is pure evil.
posted by bendy at 3:39 AM on July 7, 2023

Ozymandias: Have at least six status badges at the top of the README of your repo, half of which are broken.

Waiting out the News Cycle: Make a PR, get comments criticizing core aspects of it, don’t respond for a week, then merge it anyway.
posted by ignignokt at 4:54 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

This is pure evil. RL

I think I qualify for at least a couple, not saying which.
posted by sammyo at 5:43 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Funny stuff. Thanks.

Reminded I am of the Great Development Path Debates: Is the trunk always dev, and release candidates branch off of that, or does the current branch become the RC and next dev (sprint) is a new branch?

Yes this dates me, and also that I didn't keep up well enough with advanced versioning hygiene and practices. I was pretty good with setting up and using subversion/Tortoise, at one point.

So, towards the end of my career, my likely achievement was Village Idiot - always asking what branch to work on, how/where to merge, and Most Likely to Screw It Up.
posted by Artful Codger at 6:49 AM on July 7, 2023

Bleep-bloop!
posted by The otter lady at 8:01 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

> The Pedant: submits a PR for over 100 files, all of which involve removing odd bits of white space or correcting punctuation, often incorrectly.

white space, especially, is an aspect of the style guide that needs to be enforced by the linter. if you never drift away from stuff like that, the pedant won't have the opportunity to hlep out by "fixing" non-adherent code
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 8:08 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do-Over!: Rather than fixing the git disaster you have created, just blow away your local repo and clone again from master.
posted by SunSnork at 9:47 AM on July 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

white space, especially, is an aspect of the style guide that needs to be enforced by the linter.

Hobbit: Yes, but what about second linter?
posted by SunSnork at 9:51 AM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

"I'd rather a screenshot of a text terminal or even a photo of the screen rather than "it said something about something happening, or not happening, in some other thing and there was a big number? "

I'm constantly shocked by how often I find myself working with ostensible python programmers who can't read a python stack trace. Like how do you fix anything? Just ask me for help everytime things go wrong, I suppose?
posted by kaibutsu at 10:20 AM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

> white space, especially, is an aspect of the style guide that needs to be enforced by the linter. if you never drift away from stuff like that, the pedant won't have the opportunity to hlep out by "fixing" non-adherent code

Fortunately, "the linter" works differently on different machines. Being The Pedant is mandatory!
posted by eruonna at 10:41 AM on July 7, 2023

Do-Over!: Rather than fixing the git disaster you have created, just blow away your local repo and clone again from master.

I feel personally called out by this one
posted by Television Name at 11:01 AM on July 7, 2023

Called out?!? I wrote it up as best-practice for my team:
- develop against HEAD (main/master/release branch, united states of nevermind)
- git diff > $spare_filename
- restore local to HEAD
- create new branch for your changes
- checkout new branch
[- option to clone again from master]
- git apply $spare_filename
- fixup differences
- rerun tests
- git commit
- git push
- do merge request
posted by k3ninho at 12:59 PM on July 7, 2023

one take on why git is such a pain in the ass — which is the take i had before i got more intimately familiar with it — is that git is by necessity fiendishly complex because distributed version control is an inherently fiendishly complex task. but now that i know it better, my updated take is that:

1. people who are unpleasant to be around write software that's unpleasant to use
2. linus torvalds is an asshole

posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 1:29 PM on July 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

linus torvalds is an asshole

And can I just say as a generic unix user, Thank God, can you imagine if all the wacky, corporate, and malicious bits of code that I'm sure have requested a push by nice good meaning devs were actually allowed to be integrated into the Linux kernel?
posted by sammyo at 2:08 PM on July 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

And can I just say as a generic unix user, Thank God, can you imagine if all the wacky, corporate, and malicious bits of code that I'm sure have requested a push by nice good meaning devs were actually allowed to be integrated into the Linux kernel?

Nice doesn't mean that you're a doormat.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:34 PM on July 7, 2023

I would just like to add:

And then there’s git rebase --interactive, which is a bit like git commit --amend hopped up on acid and holding a chainsaw–completely insane and quite dangerous but capable of exposing entirely new states of mind."

-Ryan Tomayko, The Thing About Git, April 2008

posted by mikelieman at 2:43 PM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

> And can I just say as a generic unix user, Thank God, can you imagine if all the wacky, corporate, and malicious bits of code that I'm sure have requested a push by nice good meaning devs were actually allowed to be integrated into the Linux kernel?

yeah nah that's not what i'm talking about. please don't conflate "effective" and "asshole" — there's already way too much discourse that treats those two very different things as equivalent.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 2:47 PM on July 7, 2023

Can I interest you in my kickstarter “git for git”?

It’s git for git: you can version your git repositories.

All the commands are sequences of “git checkout”.
posted by lowtide at 5:50 PM on July 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

so there’s this trend, right, of podcasts that go into absurdly meticulous depth on a particular topic — probably the best of these is history of philosophy without any gaps, which took like a year to get past aristotle and about a decade to get up to the renaissance.

I mention this because i’ve long had this idea for a joke podcast with possibly the worst effort-to-payoff ratio possible but which i nevertheless keep finding compelling as an idea. what is this podcast idea, you ask? okay, the podcast is titled something like “a practical comprehensive guide to git” but it goes into such depth on the underlying technologies/concepts and on the history of version control that it never actually directly discusses git or gives any practical information on how to use it, just perpetually going deeper and deeper into random details in order to avoid any actual practicalities.

(this idea is inspired by literally every git explainer, since they all start with thousands of largely opaque words punctuated by dozens of little drawings of horizontal trees that make perfect sense if and only if you already know how to use git)
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 5:54 PM on July 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

Monoid in the category of endofunctors: Create a repository whose sole purpose is explaining git.
posted by kaibutsu at 10:33 PM on July 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

ugh okay a hobbyhorse: i jump on it.

>Thank God, can you imagine if all the wacky, corporate, and malicious bits of code

i'm going to focus that word "corporate" here. sometimes people talk about open source software as if it were still the free software days, back before the term "open source" was invented, when unreconstructed stallmanites still trod the earth, and when the goal of collaboratively developing software in public was to keep software development on a whole on academic lines rather than for-profit ones — to establish (or reëstablish) a world where software is treated like research and freely shared among other researchers + anyone else who might care to use the results of that research.

which is a goal that i'm 100% on board with for two reasons:

1. yes. correct. that is how software development should be organized.
2. stallman, who is to be clear a political naïf and who is (as we are all required to note up-front in all discussions of him) such a missing stair that women at mit started carrying plants whenever they needed to visit his office, may or may not have realized what he was actually doing when via the original gpl and his own prodigious ability to produce outrageous amounts of indispensable code he attempted to force software development back onto academic research lines and off of corporate pure-self-interest ones. but people in his circles absolutely positively did know what he was doing, because when he got started on the gnu project boston-area computer science was low-key a hotbed of genuine marxism. you know what, let me break out of the numbered list for this one:

so software development absolutely is academic research and should be treated that way, and if you look at the original gpl from that perspective, it's an apolitical-ish ivory tower project to ensure the quality of academic research. but also, software is and every day becomes more of a key component of the means of production, like, in the "seize the" sense, and holy cats free software as original conceived of was in fact indeed 100% a push to seize the means of production, whether or not the guy who invented the concept realized it.

this actually radical (even if possibly accidentally radical) free software idea failed in the 1990s as the software ecosystem got too big too fast for the gpl to consume it, and then entirely died in the early 2000s, roundabout when the term "open source" happened.

unlike free software under the original gpl, open source software is entirely corporate. top to bottom. it's not a means of keeping software out of corporate hands, it is a means for multiple corporations to collaborate on standards that enable all of their businesses to make more money and more efficiently maintain control of the software ecosystem. and it's not modeled after academic research. instead, it's an instance of a strategy that's been used in corporate software development since the late 1950s, back when the various computer manufacturers realized that by establishing a standard business language — i speak here of course of cobol, a language beloved by all — they could grow the industry as a whole more quickly, and that doing that would ultimately be more profitable for each individual company than attempting to take marketshare from each other by developing competing bespoke languages.

the various consortia which inspired open source software were and are not benevolent organizations with benevolent goals, but instead are highly effective means for a few large corporations to maintain and expand centralized corporate control over software development by reducing inefficient competition between those few large corporations.

this is all to say: you are not a meaningful stakeholder in the course of open source development, and no one you know is, any more than you're a stakeholder in microsoft windows or whatever. how do i know that you're not important to the course of open-source software development? i know it because you are not a corporation. are you google? are you apple? then you have a say in how the open-source infrastructure of computing works. if not? then you don't.
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 10:21 AM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Do-Over!: Rather than fixing the git disaster you have created, just blow away your local repo and clone again from master.

Naw dude, that’s amateur hour stuff. Real programmers reflog and reset!

(I have done this more times than I care to admit)

(it really is like a magic eraser though)
posted by panama joe at 1:27 PM on July 8, 2023

Delete and re-clone is one of my go-to move sequences in git. It's somewhat embarrassing, but I also barely use git so can justify not wasting my time on its arcane and obtuse interface. I was excited about git when I read about its design philosophy years ago, but it is not a 'bicycle of the mind' by any stretch...
posted by kaibutsu at 4:35 PM on July 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've only met Linus once. I liked him. It maybe helped that he ever so slightly resembled a penguin.

Pijul always sounded awesome to me, but never really developed enough (previously).
posted by jeffburdges at 12:31 PM on July 9, 2023

Yeah I guess what I like about git reflog --date=iso is that it shows you every single thing you did in your repo, and you can pinpoint the exact moment things went wrong. Then you can git reset --hard and rewind the world to the moment right before everything went off the rails. Something a bit poetic about that — almost wish we could do that in real life, hehe
posted by panama joe at 10:49 PM on July 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

"I think I was able to get a list of users for some achievements, which I made a little website for over the weekend." - CQCumbers
posted by jeffburdges at 12:46 AM on July 10, 2023

github-spray via #25
posted by jeffburdges at 1:11 PM on July 11, 2023