The 2021 State of the Octoverse
The State of the Octoverse analyzes data from millions of developers & repos to share trends across working habits, productivity, and career satisfaction.

Every year, The State of the Octoverse analyzes data from millions of developers and repositories to share trends across working habits, productivity, and overall career satisfaction. This year we’re excited to share the patterns we’ve seen across the community as well as three deeper dives on shipping code, creating documentation, and sustaining communities.
We’ve also extended our research approach this year. By augmenting telemetry from four million repositories with survey responses from over 40,000 developers, you can read through predictive results and tips for improving productivity in addition to the quantitative summaries of survey results.
Preview some of the findings below, and click through each focus area to dive deeper:
Writing and shipping code faster
Teams and developers who use automation to write and deploy code perform 27% better in open source and 43% better at work. In addition, we found these groups also report higher levels of fulfillment.
Knowledge flow through documentation
Developers experience a 55% increase in productivity with good documentation. READMEs, issues, and thoughtful contribution guidelines all help make quality documentation. Enterprises can also adopt similar practices by building out robust internal documentation and innersource communities.
Sustainable and welcoming communities
Teams who report high levels of trust are two times more likely to have a healthy collaborative culture within companies, and three times more likely in open source communities. Codes of conduct, contribution guidelines, good first issues, and respectful dialogue in GitHub Discussions signal safety and drive trust.
Read the sustainable communities report
These stats only scratch the surface of this year’s data. Head over to the site, and dig into the insights to see how you can drive productivity for yourself and the teams you work with now and going forward.
Read the 2021 State of the Octoverse
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