GitHub Achievements Lab

This repository is a controlled experiment documenting how GitHub achievements may be triggered through ordinary repository activity.

Purpose

The goal of this project is to:

• Explore how GitHub achievements work
• Document which actions appear to trigger them
• Demonstrate edge cases in contribution and reputation systems
• Keep the experiment transparent, bounded, and auditable

Current Observations

Confirmed profile achievements from this experiment:

• Quickdraw
• Pull Shark

Unconfirmed or pending observations:

• YOLO did not appear after CLI/API merges or one manual UI merge without review.
• Galaxy Brain requires evidence-backed accepted answers in Discussions.
• Pair Extraordinaire requires a real co-author; fake authors are out of scope.

Discussion threads are used to collect public observations and reproducible notes: https://github.com/Airshipster/github-achievements-lab/discussions

What This Project Contains

• A small activity tracker CLI in src/tracker.py
• Structured experiment notes in docs/
• Discussion workflow notes in docs/discussions.md
• A human-readable activity log in logs/activity-log.md
• Tests for the local tracking logic in tests/

Ethics & Disclaimer

This repository is created for educational and research purposes only.

It does NOT aim to:

• exploit GitHub
• manipulate rankings or reputation
• encourage spammy behavior
• involve external repositories, unrelated users, or multiple accounts

Instead, it highlights how certain achievements can be obtained through minimal or artificial actions, in order to:

• raise awareness
• improve system transparency
• encourage better design of contribution metrics

Operating Boundaries

All actions performed here should be:

• contained within a single repository
• executed by a single user
• limited in volume
• documented in the activity log
• stopped after a fixed time window if an experiment session is running

Local Usage

Record an event:

python src/tracker.py record --type commit --title "docs: update methodology"

Show a summary:

python src/tracker.py summary

Show a filtered summary as JSON:

python src/tracker.py summary --type commit --since 2026-05-04T00:00:00Z --json --total

List recent events:

python src/tracker.py list --reverse --limit 5

Export filtered events to CSV:

python src/tracker.py export-csv --type issue --output exports/issues.csv

Validate recorded events:

python src/tracker.py validate

Run tests:

python -m unittest discover -s tests

Status

Ongoing experiment.