stackoverflow Badges

Besides gaining reputation with your questions and answers, you receive badges for being especially helpful. Badges appear on your profile page, flair, and your posts.

Question Badges

 Altruist

First bounty you manually award on another person's question

28 awarded

 Benefactor

First bounty you manually award on your own question

29 awarded

 Curious

Ask a well-received question on 5 separate days, and maintain a positive question record

138 awarded

 Inquisitive

Ask a well-received question on 30 separate days, and maintain a positive question record

1 awarded

 Socratic

Ask a well-received question on 100 separate days, and maintain a positive question record

 Favorite Question

Question favorited by 25 users

87 awarded

 Stellar Question

Question favorited by 100 users

7 awarded

 Investor

First bounty you offer on another person's question

34 awarded

 Nice Question

Question score of 10 or more

3.5k awarded

 Good Question

Question score of 25 or more

1.6k awarded

 Great Question

Question score of 100 or more

198 awarded

 Popular Question

Question with 1,000 views

6.2k awarded

 Notable Question

Question with 2,500 views

3.6k awarded

 Famous Question

Question with 10,000 views

1.4k awarded

 Promoter

First bounty you offer on your own question

39 awarded

 Scholar

Ask a question and accept an answer

5k awarded

 Student

First question with score of 1 or more

8.8k awarded

 Tumbleweed

Asked a question with zero score, no answers, no comments, and low views for a week

Answer Badges

 Enlightened

First to answer and accepted with score of 10 or more

1.9k awarded

 Explainer

Edit and answer 1 question (both actions within 12 hours, answer score > 0)

242 awarded

 Refiner

Edit and answer 50 questions (both actions within 12 hours, answer score > 0)

3 awarded

 Illuminator

Edit and answer 500 questions (both actions within 12 hours, answer score > 0)

 Generalist

Provide non-wiki answers of 15 total score in 20 of top 40 tags

 Guru

Accepted answer and score of 40 or more

983 awarded

 Nice Answer

Answer score of 10 or more

11.1k awarded

 Good Answer

Answer score of 25 or more

4k awarded

 Great Answer

Answer score of 100 or more

704 awarded

 Populist

Highest scoring answer that outscored an accepted answer with score of more than 10 by more than 2x

168 awarded

 Reversal

Provide an answer of +20 score to a question of -5 score

19 awarded

 Revival

Answer more than 30 days after a question was asked as first answer scoring 2 or more

18 awarded

 Necromancer

Answer a question more than 60 days later with score of 5 or more

206 awarded

 Self-Learner

Answer your own question with score of 3 or more

40 awarded

 Teacher

Answer a question with score of 1 or more

5.6k awarded

 Tenacious

Zero score accepted answers: more than 5 and 20% of total

 Unsung Hero

Zero score accepted answers: more than 10 and 25% of total

Participation Badges

 Autobiographer

Complete "About Me" section of user profile

23.5k awarded

 Caucus

Visit an election during any phase of an active election and have enough reputation to cast a vote

2.3k awarded

 Constituent

Vote for a candidate in the final phase of an election

1.3k awarded

 Commentator

Leave 10 comments

2.4k awarded

 Pundit

Leave 10 comments with score of 5 or more

361 awarded

 Enthusiast

Visit the site each day for 30 consecutive days. (Days are counted in UTC.)

423 awarded

 Fanatic

Visit the site each day for 100 consecutive days. (Days are counted in UTC.)

115 awarded

 Mortarboard

Earn at least 200 reputation (the daily maximum) in a single day

911 awarded

 Epic

Earn 200 daily reputation 50 times

19 awarded

 Legendary

Earn 200 daily reputation 150 times

4 awarded

 Precognitive

Followed the Area 51 proposal for this site before it entered the commitment phase

52 awarded

 Beta

Voted 10 times, added 3 posts score > 0, and visited the site on 3 separate days during the private beta

62 awarded

 Quorum

One post with score of 2 on meta

422 awarded

 Convention

10 posts with score of 2 on meta

43 awarded

 Talkative

Post 10 messages, with 1 or more starred, in chat

272 awarded

 Outspoken

Post 10 messages in chat starred by 10 different users

31 awarded

 Yearling

Active member for a year, earning at least 200 reputation

5.3k awarded

Tag Badges

 Bronze Badge

You must have a total score of 100 in at least 20 non-community wiki answers to achieve this badge.

494 awarded

 Silver Badge

You must have a total score of 400 in at least 80 non-community wiki answers to achieve this badge.

56 awarded

 Gold Badge

You must have a total score of 1000 in at least 200 non-community wiki answers to achieve this badge.

3 awarded

Moderation Badges

 Citizen Patrol

First flagged post

2.1k awarded

 Deputy

Raise 80 helpful flags

70 awarded

 Marshal

Raise 500 helpful flags

9 awarded

 Civic Duty

Vote 300 or more times

499 awarded

 Cleanup

First rollback

148 awarded

 Constable

Served as a pro-tem moderator for at least 1 year or through site graduation

5 awarded

 Sheriff

Served as an elected moderator for at least 1 year

5 awarded

 Critic

First down vote

2.4k awarded

 Custodian

Complete at least one review task. This badge is awarded once per review type

1.8k awarded

 Reviewer

Complete at least 250 review tasks. This badge is awarded once per review type

79 awarded

 Steward

Complete at least 1,000 review tasks. This badge is awarded once per review type

19 awarded

 Disciplined

Delete own post with score of 3 or higher

58 awarded

 Editor

First edit

6.7k awarded

 Strunk & White

Edit 80 posts

42 awarded

 Copy Editor

Edit 500 posts (excluding own or deleted posts and tag edits)

5 awarded

 Electorate

Vote on 600 questions and 25% or more of total votes are on questions

42 awarded

 Excavator

Edit first post that was inactive for 6 months

232 awarded

 Archaeologist

Edit 100 posts that were inactive for 6 months

 Organizer

First retag

382 awarded

 Peer Pressure

Delete own post with score of -3 or lower

491 awarded

 Proofreader

Approve or reject 100 suggested edits

34 awarded

 Sportsmanship

Up vote 100 answers on questions where an answer of yours has a positive score

21 awarded

 Suffrage

Use 30 votes in a day

238 awarded

 Supporter

First up vote

18.9k awarded

 Synonymizer

First approved tag synonym

8 awarded

 Tag Editor

First tag wiki edit

72 awarded

 Research Assistant

Edit 50 tag wikis

 Taxonomist

Create a tag used by 50 questions

71 awarded

 Vox Populi

Use the maximum 40 votes in a day

110 awarded

Other Badges

 Analytical

Visited every section of the FAQ (retired)

145 awarded

 Announcer

Share a link to a question later visited by 25 unique IP addresses

163 awarded

 Booster

Share a link to a question later visited by 300 unique IP addresses

12 awarded

 Publicist

Share a link to a question later visited by 1000 unique IP addresses

9 awarded

 Informed

Read the entire tour page

StackExchange

Regarding programming there are a lot of different formal methodologies for how you should go about it. But a lot of those assume you are already knowledgeable in the programming language and coding task at hand.
There's also a lot of differing ideas on how to best learn things. But most of these are geared for pure learning, and don't really address the situation of a busy person who just wants to learn enough to get something done, for which there may not be examples, documentation, or mentors.
The most effective method I've seen for this kind of situation I picked up from some mathematician/programmers on one of my projects, which they called "Toy Driven Development". I've adopted that style with my own personal projects to good effect.
Starting from zero, you think about the general goal you want to get to, and identify one or more problems you think you'll need to solve in order to get there. Select the simplest sounding problem that isn't something you already know. Do some research (via google) to see if anyone's already done it (or asked about it on StackExchange!), and if so snag the example, take it apart, study it, master it, and tweak it into something more closely resembling the project ahead of you.
If there is no such thing, then you have some experimenting to do. Find out what you can via manuals or whatever and get hacking. If you get stuck, ask for help or to bounce ideas off others. But keep your goal simple. You may realize that the single problem is often several; if so pick one and write the others down to work on later. Don't worry to much about proper code formatting or writing tests or documenting interfaces or any of that (unless it helps you think), just focus on the specific problem you're trying to sort out. Once you've solved the problem, do tidy up the code to get rid of superfluous scaffolding or test code to make your toy clearer. You want it short, something that makes a good example. If you can get the toy to do something useful by itself, that's perfect. Use the toy in various different ways to see if you can break it or find bugs.
Next, whether you found an example or made one yourself, put it in an Experiments folder, and move on to the next problem you want to have done. Keep iterating until you have a handful of these toys.
Then, shift gears to "integration". In this phase your coding should stick to things you already know well. Assemble a good solid infrastructure for your code, documenting and writing tests for each bit as you go (or write the tests and/or documentation first!) Don't cut and paste your toy code directly into your project, but instead use it as a reference as you re-write the code properly. When you get to a point where you're just not certain how to properly do some new feature, that's your signal to go make another toy.
Anyway, the point is to keep the (fun) experimental work separate from your project. This helps you control the balance of time you spend learning vs. implementing, and helps you shake bugs out of new code ideas before they infect your main codebase.
Same approach when reading a programming book. Read a little, run the examples and do some experiments to solidify what you've learned. Then go back and read more. But if it's something you already are relatively comfortable with (like learning your 5th programming language) then just read straight through.