[unimpressive]

It seems to be encouraged:

"We have per-level leaderboards which give people a meaningful number to golf on, and additionally, we have discretion to (automatically or after human review) award additional badges for going above-and-beyond on a level. We’ll also do that outside of levels, too — I can imagine issuing badges for people who, e.g., write OSS clients for our API, submit documentation patches, responsibly report security issues, etc." - http://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/08/20/designing-and-building-s...