Top Trends in GitHub’s 2018 Overview

GitHub’s State of the Octoverse reviews the top trends in the software development universe. This year’s version was made from statistics over the last 365 days from October 1st, 2017 to September 30th, 2018.

A lot of work has been done in the last one year, with over 1.1 billion contributions so far beating last year’s record of 1.0 billion contributions.

This year’s overview took a look at aspects such as location, timing, repositories, marketing, security.

The People

Today, GitHub has 31 million users. Without a doubt, the people give life to the platform, making contributions and building stuff to make the world a better place.

In the last one year, GitHub has seen 7 million new users. A massive increase from the total number of 24 million users when GitHub’s State of the Octoverse was released last year.

Contributions are coming from almost every part of the world. The contributions from the United States alone are 20% and the rest of the world has 80%. This is an improvement when considering the landscape used to be dominated almost completely by contributions from the United States alone.

China and India have the second and third most contributions to projects on the platform, keeping their places from last year.

Looking at countries that increased in the rankings, Japan and Spain both moved two places — Japan from 10th to 8th place and Spain from 14th to 12th place — while Hong Kong moved from outside the top twenty to 17th place.

Without a doubt, Asia is the fastest growing community of developers, with China, India, Japan, and Hong Kong taking various place on the list of top twenty places with most contributors.

Egypt and Nigeria are making a statement in the GitHub community too. Both countries made the top ten list when sorting the fastest growing countries by the number of contributors, organizations created, repositories created and open source repositories created.

One very noticeable trend is the huge drop in activities during holiday periods. Activities slowed down massively around Christmas to New Year periods, rising back to normal activities by mid-January. Looks like developers take full advantage of holiday periods.

It is not only professional developers who use GitHub, students do too. About 18 thousand schools are using GitHub and 1.1 million students learning with the platform. 600 thousand students are using the GitHub Student Developer Pack and 20 thousand teachers are using GitHub to improve the quality of their teaching.

As a result, GitHub now has about three million classroom repositories.

And more about people:

The Projects

Lots of projects exist on GitHub today. The platform now hosts about 96 million repositories with more than 200 million pull requests. In 2018 alone, there have been about 67 million pull requests beating the 47 million pull requests gotten in 2017.

This year’s reports have seen VSCode and React Native remain the projects with most contributors, with NPM dropping to ninth place from third place in last years report. Tensorflow has experienced the highest rise on the list of top ten projects with most contributors moving from sixth place to third place.

Microsoft’s Azure documentation, Pytorch, and the Godot Game Engine are the top three fastest growing open source projects. This gives an insight into the great future of cloud infrastructure and deep learning in the technology space.

Looking at companies that trended, in the list of companies with most contributions by employees, Microsoft was first with 7700 contributions, Google was second with 5500 contributions and Red Hat was third with 3300 contributions.

When it comes to topics that interests developers, JavaScript related topics seem to be trending. React and Node JS are the number one and number three most tagged topics respectively, with android topics coming second place. Other JavaScript related topics that made the top ten list of most tagged topics are Angular and Electron.

When it comes to the language of choice, nothing much has changed in the last year. The top four languages used for contribution to projects remain JavaScript, Java, Python and PHP.

The downward trend has continued for Ruby over the years despite the love of millions of programmers for the language. Ruby has been experiencing a drop since 2015 when it was fifth place, presently the language lies tenth place.

TypeScript is the highest mover in the last one year, going from tenth place to seventh place which is quite impressive.

In the list of fastest-growing languages, Kotlin, HCL, and TypeScript make the top three. HCL making the list shouldn’t come as a surprise since it is a result of the huge interest in DevOps in the last one year.

Other languages with huge prospects such as Rust and Go are the fifth place and seventh place respectively.

The Platforms

GitHub experienced a 33 percent increase in the number of applications added to the platform in the last one year, with two times more app installs. These apps have helped double the productivity of more than 150,000 developers and organization.

Of the applications installed from Github the top three stacks are:

• CI + Security + Project management
• CI + Security + Code quality
• CI + Project management + Code quality

GitHub also launched a security alert feature this year, which alerts contributors to open source projects on the vulnerability issues of their applications. This feature has raised more than 5 million issues already.

Still talking about security, from Github’ Bug Bounty program, application security engineers and researchers have resolved 213 bug reports, earning more than $300,000 in the process.

Wrapping Up

Over the years, more developers are beginning to use GitHub for hosting their projects. This means the yearly reports would give better insights of the whole technology ecosystem. It is left to developers, testers, admins, project managers to take advantage of these insights.

From this year’s overview, we can see that Asia as a continent is beginning to have a strong say in the development of open source projects and GitHub’s student developer pack is actually having an impact on the software development community.

From the project’s angle, Tensorflow and Pytorch are looking like they would be massively important artificial intelligence tools in the future. It also looks like the Godot gaming engine would have a huge say in the future of video game development.

For developers and system administrators still having doubts in the power of DevOps, this year’s overview should be huge enough sign to show how big a future it has in software development processes.

Finally, security remains a critical issue for every software. There will always be vulnerabilities, therefore developers should try as much as possible to know about the best practices for building software to help reduce the vulnerabilities.

Written by Anton Shaleynikov