GitHub recently released its State of the Octoverse report, its annual report looking back at the code and communities building on GitHub in the past year. The report shows that during 2021, the developer community evolved from learning to balance personal and work lives in the Covid-19 pandemic to creating valuable patterns and processes that meet this new era of remote work.
It dives in on trends across the more than 73M developers worldwide building on GitHub—including 16M+ new users in 2021 and 84% of the Fortune 100. In addition to celebrating community growth, for the first time, the report includes survey data from 40K+ developers and research into 4M code repositories to provide more insight on everything – from how developers are shipping code faster to the rise in productivity during the pandemic as more developers worked remotely.
GitHub saw a 38.9% year-on-year growth in total users from India and a 24.8% growth in total active students from the country. It states that almost 70% of active users in the code repository are now from outside North America. The fastest-growing countries and regions outside of the US include Indonesia, Brazil, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, UK and China.
Some of the key highlights of the report were:
- Performance can increase up to 87% when reusing code: Projects built with code and toolchains from the open-source community are thriving. Projects see 2x performance compared to those with more friction, like slow processes or multiple approval layers.
- Company teams perform 43% better using automation: Automating software delivery is a key enabler in open source and helps teams go faster at scale. Using actions increases the number of merged pull requests by 36% and shrinks time to merge by 33%.
- Productivity is returning to pre-pandemic levels, but the workplace is shifting; only 11% of developers expect to return to collocation: That’s a 30% drop from the 41% who worked in an office before.
- Developers find more fulfilment with automation: By removing friction and repetitive tasks through automation, teams perform 27% better in open source and 43% better at work, and developers report higher fulfilment.
- Mentorship is an asset in both open source and companies: When there is a commitment to coaching and mentoring — e.g. through friendly and timely code reviews for new contributors or new hires — teams see a 46% improvement in productivity within open-source projects and a 16% improvement within companies.
- Developers are now writing and shipping code faster, pull requests with just one reviewer are often merged within an 8-hour workday, and with each additional reviewer, merging it in a day goes down by 17%. Assigning no more than three reviewers in an open-source repo can be a tradeoff between quality and speed, says the report.
“Automation helps reduce repetitive tasks, redundancies and errors, allowing developer teams to focus on higher-value challenges and drive innovation. Ultimately, automation aims at empowering developers, enhancing developer experience and productivity, and helping create the right environment for them to innovate, solve challenging problems, and make a difference,” said Maneesh Sharma, General Manager, GitHub India.
JavaScript emerged as the top language, while Python continues to be the second most widely used language, with Java following as the third. TypeScript, which moved up to the fourth position last year, still maintains its position. Of all the ten languages surveyed, only Shell and C changed places from last year — Shell climbed one notch up to 8th position, displacing C.
