GitHub achievements are the platform's attempt to gamify a craft that does not gamify well. They appear as small enamel-pin shaped badges on the right side of a developer's profile, awarded for behaviours that GitHub has decided are worth marking. Most developers have a few. Almost nobody has them all. The community alternates between rolling their eyes at the whole system and quietly checking the page after every merged pull request.
What follows is a guide to every active badge. Each entry covers what the badge requires, how to unlock it, and the slightly more interesting question of what it actually says about the developer who has it.
The standard badges
These are the ones available to every account. They are tiered, which means each one can be earned multiple times, with the colour of the badge changing as the count rises. The tiers run default, then bronze, silver, and gold. Gold is the top; there is no rank above it.
Pull Shark
Awarded for opening pull requests that get merged. Two merged pull requests unlock the default badge, sixteen unlock bronze, one hundred and twenty-eight unlock silver, and one thousand and twenty-four unlock gold. The numbers double each time, which is a small joke at the expense of anyone counting.
The badge says less than it appears to. Two merged pull requests is a single decent week's work; one thousand is a multi-year accumulation. A gold Pull Shark is a reasonable signal that someone has been writing code consistently for at least a few years.
Pair Extraordinaire
Awarded for co-authoring commits using Git's Co-authored-by: trailer. One co-authored commit unlocks the default badge, ten unlock bronze, twenty-four unlock silver, and forty-eight unlock gold.
This one is more interesting than it looks. Pair Extraordinaire requires a specific Git workflow - genuine pair programming with the trailer correctly applied - which most teams do not practise. Seeing it on a profile usually means the developer either works at one of the small number of companies that practises real pairing or has gone out of their way to credit collaborators on solo commits, which is its own kind of signal.
Quickdraw
Awarded for closing an issue or pull request within five minutes of it being opened. A single occurrence unlocks it.
The badge is harder to read than the others because the speed can mean opposite things. A maintainer who closes spam issues quickly will collect it within days. So will a developer who triages well. So will someone who opens and immediately closes their own pull requests by mistake.
Galaxy Brain
Awarded for having answers accepted in GitHub Discussions. Two accepted answers unlock the default badge, eight unlock bronze, sixteen unlock silver, and thirty-two unlock gold.
Galaxy Brain is the badge most likely to be missing from senior engineers' profiles, because senior engineers tend to answer questions on Slack and Discord rather than in public Discussions. When you see it, especially at gold or above, the developer is almost certainly an active open source maintainer or a deliberate community contributor.
YOLO
Awarded for merging a pull request without review. A single occurrence unlocks it. It is the only badge whose name openly acknowledges that the behaviour it rewards is, in most circumstances, a mild mistake.
Most developers earn YOLO once, on their own repository, by accident. Seeing it on a profile means little. Not seeing it on a profile that otherwise has a lot of activity is, oddly, more telling - it usually means the developer either works exclusively in environments where merges require review, or has gone out of their way never to merge their own work alone.
Public Sponsor
Awarded for sponsoring an open source developer or project through GitHub Sponsors. A single sponsorship unlocks it.
This is the only badge that costs money. It is also, quietly, the most reliable signal on a profile. A developer with the Public Sponsor badge has actually moved real currency in support of someone else's work, which is rarer than the discourse around open source suggests.
Starstruck
Awarded for accumulating stars on your own repositories. Sixteen stars unlock the default badge, one hundred and twenty-eight unlock bronze, five hundred and twelve unlock silver, and four thousand and ninety-six unlock gold.
Starstruck is the badge that most cleanly tracks a single, hard-to-fake thing: other people finding your work and choosing to mark it. A bronze Starstruck means a project that found a real audience. Silver and above usually means a developer whose name is recognised in their corner of the ecosystem, whether they planned for that or not.
Experimental and not yet released
Two badges in the achievements system are part of an unreleased experimental rollout, cannot currently be earned, and have appeared on profiles only by mistake when GitHub briefly enabled them in error. The most recent confirmed removal was in March 2026.
Heart On Your Sleeve is rumoured, based on the criteria GitHub has tested, to be awarded for reacting to something with a heart emoji.
Open Sourcerer is rumoured, based on the same tested criteria, to be awarded for having pull requests merged across multiple public repositories.
Neither is currently obtainable. Profiles displaying them collected them during one of the brief windows in which the badges were live by accident.
The retired and the rare
GitHub has quietly retired several badges over the years, and the ones that survive on profiles from before the retirement date have become something close to collector's items.
The most famous of these is Mars 2020 Contributor, awarded to developers whose code shipped in repositories used by NASA's Perseverance rover. The badge was a one-time award; no new ones are being issued. A profile carrying it belongs to someone whose code is, in the most literal sense, on another planet.
Arctic Code Vault Contributor was awarded for contributions to repositories that were archived in the GitHub Arctic Code Vault snapshot taken in February 2020. The vault itself still exists, in a decommissioned coal mine on Svalbard, but the badge was a one-off and has been retired. Holders sometimes describe themselves on Twitter as "frozen in the ice with React 16."
What the badges quietly say
The honest reading of the achievements system is that it tracks a specific, narrow set of behaviours and rewards them in a way that flatters anyone who happens to do them naturally. It misses everything that matters about a developer's work. It does not see code review depth, design judgement, mentorship, debugging instinct, or the long quiet hours of figuring out what to build.
What it does capture, taken as a set, is the rhythm of a developer's public life. A profile with a gold Pull Shark, a silver Galaxy Brain, and a Public Sponsor belongs to someone who ships, helps, and gives. A profile with a single bronze Pull Shark and nothing else belongs to someone whose real work happens elsewhere, which is most developers.
The badges decorate the profile. The contribution history is the real record. The graph itself, and the years of small daily work it represents, will outlast the achievements system, whose colours and rules will keep shifting as GitHub experiments with what to gamify next.
If you want to keep a version of the real record, rather than the decorations, that is what we make. Your contribution history rendered as a vintage star atlas, every commit a star, every quiet week a dark space. The digital download is £10 and the smallest physical print is £25. The badges stay on the profile. The atlas goes on a wall.