Github octoverse survey shows coders are creatures of habit

Chris Merriman
@ChrisTheDJ
18 October 2018

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SAN FRANCISCO: GITHUB HAS launched its annual 'State of the Octoverse' report as part of this year's Universe conference. The survey is one of the few that we at INQ take a second look at, as it tells the tale of the open source sector from the point of view of those right in the middle.

There are over 31 million developers hosting a total of 96 million repositories on GitHub, which represents roughly 95 per cent of the open source codebase. To put it another way, GitHub has now seen over 200 million pull requests - of which a third were created in the last 12 months.

Over 1.1 million students have learned to code with GitHub resources whilst usage by companies, either privately or publicly, has risen by 44 per cent to a new high of 2.1 million.

So not only has GitHub welcomed over 8 million new developers in the last 12 months, which is more than the first six years of GitHub put together, but they're also more active with the amount of productivity from new recruits being higher than in 2017.

The US is the most populous country for GitHub users, but that's only around 20 per cent of the melting pot. China and India come in second and third, with the UK fourth and Germany fifth ahead of Canada, Brazil, Japan. Russia and France.

So, per capita, it does seem as if Brits are the most productive GitHubbers, though the most repositories in total have come from Asia. Which makes sense as there are more of them.

Breaking that down, the top five fastest-growing countries for devs are Hong Kong, Singapore, Egypt, Nigeria and Bangladesh.

Some things seem obvious - traffic goes down after 10pm. Fewer private (and probably corporate) repositories are touched at the weekend.

In education, GitHub continues to wow, with 600,000 students of the 1.1 million we mentioned currently actively learning with the platform. They're being taught by over 20,000 teachers creating over 200,000 assignments, and being represented in 18,000 schools.

The most popular projects amongst users include Microsoft/vscode (19k), facebook/react-native (10k), tensorflow (9.3k), angular/angular-cli (8.8k) and MicrosoftDocs/azure-docs (7.8k).

The azure-docs project is actually the fastest growing year on year, with 4.7x more contributors. And speaking of contributors, new bosses at Microsoft are the biggest contributors of code, with 7.700 commits, followed by Google (5.500), RedHat (3,300), UC Berkeley (2,700), Intel (2,200) and University of Washington (1,800).

The top five languages haven't changed much with JavaScript, Java, Python, PHP and C++ making up the same top five as last year. In fact aside from Ruby, which has plummetted, along with C#, there haven't been any changes to the top five in five years.

But of the new breed, it's Kotlin that is the fastest growing language. The Russian new kid on the block has proved hugely popular with young developers, with HCL, TypeScript, PowerShell and Rust making up the top five.

All of which is fascinating. What we're interested to see though is this time next year. The deal with Microsoft will be done. And a year is a long time in anyone's politics. μ