Here at PyCon, attendees get the usual ribbons dangling from their badges: Speaker, Sponsor, etc. They’re always a topic of conversation, especially if you have three or more, or are wearing any of the joke ones like “Workaholic” or “King”.

But most attendees have no ribbons, and it occured to me we could have tokens for everyone. I thought of them as merit badges, but the more current terminology would be acheivements.

For example:

• I wrote a metaclass
• I avoided writing a metaclass!
• I introduced a friend to Guido
• I contributed to CPython
• I grok PyPy
• I taught a kid to program

And so on. Could be fun.