GitHub Octoverse 2017 Overview — Top Trends

At DashBouquet we actively use GitHub so obviously we keep an eye on all the information related to it. Recently GitHub released a summary for 2017 with lots of numbers and data in it — all about developers and their use of GitHub. We thought it would be a good idea to share it with you because for sure you are part of these numbers as well.

First of all, this year the community on GitHub hit 24 million developers from 200 countries with 1.5 million total organizations and 67 million total repositories.

The numbers are impressive indeed and now let’s break them into more details.

Counting from September 2016, the GitHub community generated 25.3 million active repos, meaning committed code, created comments, etc. There were also created 12.5 million active issues and 1.3 million new requests. But this data is very general and since we are writing our blog for developers, for sure you’d like to learn about the top programming languages on GitHub.

JavaScript is number one with 2.3 million users (and honestly, we are loving it too), second place is taken by Python (1 million users) and third place goes to Java (986k users). It’s interesting to know that this year Python became more popular than Java and had 40% more pull requests opened in 2017.

In January 2017 GitHub released topics, which are repository tags that you can use in your search, finding the project by technology, industry and so on. The top tags are: machine-learning, game, iOS, API, deep-learning, game, blog, database. We are not surprised by this fact since machine learning has been gaining great popularity since 2016 and the game industry is also seeing great changes that lead to more developers taking interest in it.

Now, if we speak more about business, it would be worth mentioning that 52% of companies in Fortune 50 use GitHub for building their software and from Fortune 100 it would be 45% of the companies. And these companies vary in the industries they represent: GitHub helps building software for software & internet, financial services, business services, manufacturing and education (the top industries). And do you want to know the top apps installed by organizations? They are Codecov, Buddybuild, WaffleBot, GreenKeeper, and GitBook.

In May 2017 we launched Marketplace to help you improve your workflow and find new ways to work efficiently. There are 26 apps in Marketplace now and the top most installed paid apps there are Codacy, Codecov (again!), ZenHub, CircleCi, Travis CI.

GitHub is also so cool because it’s one of the best places to learn. There are over 505k students currently learning on GitHub and 5,300 teachers. The reason for that is simple: since Student Developer Pack launch in 2014, over 850k students learned how to become pros in coding.

So what’s the summary? 6.7 million new developers since 2016 and 451k new organizations. The majority of newcomers identify themselves as students and 28% claim they are professionals. What’s interesting is that 45% percent of newbies say they have a bit of experience and 45% say they are completely new to the programming.

GitHub is all about helping to build, use and share software. GitHub team works on finding new ways connecting people and software through events and building partnerships with nonprofits worldwide. Figures don’t lie with 121 social impact events sponsored, 14 patchwork events held and 667 new non-profit accounts created.

Which is a pretty convincing argument why one should join GitHub ASAP?

Based on the State of the Octoverse 2017.

Written by Natalia Kukushkina

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