I just loaded the SO homepage, and every one of the "Recent Badges" listed down the right-hand side was a "Yearling" badge.
Did I just happen to arrive right after some cron job had run?
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Sign up to join this communityI just loaded the SO homepage, and every one of the "Recent Badges" listed down the right-hand side was a "Yearling" badge.
Did I just happen to arrive right after some cron job had run?
As the others said, Yearling is issued daily, and all those users signed up on 25 Sep (2008 and 2009). Here's a list of the creation dates of all the accounts listed as receiving Yearling on the homepage right now: http://odata.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/q/11723/
Yes, the cron job for Yearling runs at midnight UTC.
The job that checks when "Yearling" should be awarded presumably only runs once a day...so yeah, you probably arrived at the "right" time.