So, it’s been a year since GitHub created a badge commemorating the first Mars Helicopter by NASA. Apparently, every single one of nearly 12000 developers contributed to software used by Ingenuity got a badge showing their contribution to it. If anyone authored a commit present in the commit history up to certain tags for certain software, then you’re eligible for it. I’m pretty sure the true number will be more than 12000, since the “nearly 12000” numbers are the ones that only registered to GitHub, but in some cases like Linux kernel, I’m pretty sure there are many non-GitHub users since you can only submit your patches by e-mail.
Most software that are used by Ingenuity are Python (such as SciPy, NumPy, Matplotlib, among others), but there are some critical software as well such as the Linux kernel, zlib, and curl.
Now, My GitHub account got the badge because I contributed to curl one time before its 7.72.0 release. The commit itself is relatively simple as I was making the Makefile compatible with non-GNU Make since I was involved with Wyverkiss and subsequently trying to upstream some patches.
As far as patches go, I only contributed a small and simple one, and it doesn’t actually touch the code of curl at all, just the build system so it doesn’t actually run the Ingenuity at all.
And now, the question is: Do I really deserve the badge? Ultimately, my patches are unneeded to actually run Ingenuity at all, and aside of never disabling it in my GitHub profile (it’s automatically displayed), I never made any mention of it in my résumé/CV since I figured it would be disingenious since I actually didn’t really make a significant contribution.
Oh well.