Nerd Merit Badges

So John Young and I received our first batch of Nerd Merit Badges yesterday and threw up a website to collect information from people who are interested. 

Patch 01: Contributed to Open Source - The thing that started it (for me at least) was contributing some fixes and enhancements to a few open source projects hosted on GitHub which made me extremely happy that I was able to give back. Some of you may not be familiar with Git or GitHub, but I believe the combination of the two has really encouraged people to contribute to open source projects. I know I wouldn’t have taken the effort to submit a patch if it wasn’t for GitHub. The image on the patch is that of GitHub’s “mascot", the Octocat. If you haven’t looked into Git or GitHub, I highly suggest you do since they are great tools and lower the barrier to entry to contributing. 

Side note: I understand we’re going to get some criticism for the image we chose but I don’t really care. It’s mostly going to be from people that won’t use new tools just because they think they are “trendy" or think they earned something “more" than someone else. If you have given back to the community in any way, even just 1 little bug fix, I think you should be proud and deserve to be acknowledged.