The Problems 40,000+ Developers Have in Common

GitHub is a company that offers a cloud-based service of Git repository hosting. In plain terms, GitHub is a company that provides developers with a store to keep their code while they help developers manage them and track and control the changes made to a developer's code.

Every year, GitHub State of the Octoverse analyzes data across millions of repositories to understand developers' work habits, productivity, and career fulfillment. This year, the research has driven GitHub to release a report on how developers' experience can be improved by creating documentations, enhancing performance and well-being, and supporting communities more smartly and sustainably.

The research was carried out by analyzing telemetry data from about 4million+ repositories and survey results from over 12,000 developers, thereby giving insight into the current trends and predicting how they can serve developers, teams, organizations, and communities better.

According to the highlight of the State of Octoverse report, GitHub came up with a predictive model based on the survey data for this year to make them understand what makes developers and teams perform better, be more productive, and have excellent development experience.

The report highlight also shows how much GitHub has grown since the beginning of the year, and it showed that 16million+ users started using GitHub after the pandemic year, 84% of Fortune 100 companies use GitHub Enterprise, 170million pull requests merged, 61million+ new repository created and 73million+ total developers use GitHub.

The number of GitHub active users ranges across six geographical regions, with the highest 31.5% being from North America (decreased about 2.3% from last year), followed by Asia 31.2% (increased 0.3% from last year), then Europe 27.3% (0.7% increase), South America, Africa and Oceania having 5.9%, 2.3% and 1.7% respectively (increased 1.0%, 0.3%, and 0.1% respectively).

There have been different programming languages used on GitHub, and the report shows languages for the past eight years (2014 - 2021). The languages include Java, JavaScript, Python, C, C++, C#, Shell, Ruby, PHP, TypeScript, and Objective-C (died out since 2016).

According to the report, the survey results of over 12,000 developers showed that there is now a workplace shift as the paradigm shift of remote and hybrid work solidifies after the pandemic. The survey showed that 41.% of respondents worked in an office before the pandemic and 10.7% expected to work in an office after the pandemic, 28.1% worked hybrid before the pandemic, and 47.6% expected to work hybrid after the pandemic, 26.5% worked fully remote while 38.8% expected to work fully remote after the pandemic.

Also, the report showed that developers, when writing code like automation and in GitHub words, "Automation can enhance sustainability". Automation removes friction and repetitive tasks and makes teams perform 27% better in open source and 43% better at work.

It was noted that documenting codes, especially open source improves productivity and invites collaboration. Documented projects, i.e., code with README on GitHub, make developers 55% more productive. The survey showed the percentage of code with and without README on GitHub. For open source projects, there are 14.1% of code without README and 85.9% with README. Open source at work code has 12.26% code without README and 87.74% with README. Work code has 84.33% of code without README and 15.67% with README.

There has also been a new development, "pull request wrangling", that will be done on Kubernetes. A pull request wrangler is a Kubernetes contributor that has reached the approver status in the Kubernetes community. The new development "pull request wrangling" is aimed at helping the Kubernetes community maintain its current documentation, make sure new documentations are in sync with new release code, and enable localization of the docs by the community because the Kubernetes Doc Special Interest Group now has great documentation on their contribution process.

The report also shows that building sustainable communities helps in developing. A sign of a healthy community is Good First issues, codes of conduct, contribution guidelines, and respectful language in discussions. Communities with these characteristics entice more contributors. The survey shows that 47.8% of respondents contribute code in a private company, 27.9% contributes in education, 13.5% contributes to open source projects, 5.5% in open source project for a company, and 5.3% don't contribute in either education, open source projects or private company project.

About 40,000 developers were asked on how to make GitHub better their policy and the concerns they all came up with are:

• To be able to innovate and tinker without encountering any legal risk
• Ability to collaborate globally regardless of developers location
• Making sure everyone has the opportunity in becoming developers (Inclusion)
• Healthy collaboration online and community moderation
• More contribution to open source projects and government financial intervention