The State of the Octoverse 2019

It’s that time of year again, when we ask ourselves, “What can 40 million developers do in 365 days?” Today we published our annual Octoverse report, showing that the world’s software is built by a global community, one that’s growing, evolving, and increasingly interconnected. This year, we’ve seen that the way developers work together can change fast. We’ve also seen that software development is, increasingly, a community endeavor as it becomes easier to find and build on work from others around the world. And some of the top open source projects not only have thousands of contributors—they’re dependencies for millions of repositories.

To celebrate 365 days of achievements, let’s look back at the code and communities built on GitHub this year.

Dive into the full report—or read on for the highlights.

40M+ people are building together on GitHub, worldwide

By all metrics, more people are working together from more places than ever. There are over 40 million developers building on GitHub, most of whom (80%) come from outside of the United States. Ten million new developers joined in the last year alone, 44% more created their first repository in 2019 than 2018, and 1.3 million made their very first contribution to open source. We even saw contributions from new places, like Antarctica.

Organizations are collaborating across time zones and relying on open source software

Almost three million organization accounts are now on GitHub. Created from all over the world, these represent the collective work of companies, nonprofits, open source projects, and more. Digging in, we can see that GitHub Enterprise Cloud accounts alone came from more than 70 different countries. And 35 of the Global Fortune 50 contributed to open source this year—a glimpse into how deeply proprietary code depends on the open source source community.

The software community is more deeply connected than ever

More than 44 million repositories were created in the last year. And from machine learning in medicine and academic papers on deep learning to robots of all shapes and sizes, we’ve seen some exciting new work open sourced in just 12 months. We’ve also seen that a shared infrastructure of open source projects ties all software together and that nowhere are we more connected than in our dependency graphs.

On average, each public and private repository on GitHub depends on more than 200 packages. With hundreds of dependencies behind every project, our code is more connected than ever. And if we look at the top 50 open source projects by number of dependent repositories, we can also see that the most depended-upon projects supported more than 3.6 million other repositories this year. Projects like rails/rails, facebook/jest, and axios/axios have become critical to code around the world.

7.6M+ vulnerability alerts remediated by maintainers, developers, researchers, and more

Much like software, security is a community effort: when a potential vulnerability is found, maintainers, developers, researchers, and an ecosystem of tools all work together to keep everyone’s code safe. Since we launched security alerts in November 2017, this community has remediated more than seven million alerts.

And since Dependabot joined GitHub in May 2019, more than 209,000 pull requests were merged with automated updates, adding to more than one million pull requests merged since the app launched in April 2017.

And more

These highlights show just how much the GitHub community is growing, but our data tells millions of stories, not that we’re counting. Here are some of our favorites:

• Python passed Java as the second-most popular language on GitHub by repository contributors.
• Dart and Rust topped our list of fastest growing languages by repository contributors.
• The use of Jupyter Notebooks (by number of repositories with Jupyter as their primary language) has seen more than 100% growth year-over-year for the last three years.
• When counting contributors to its dependencies, TensorFlow’s contributors grow from 2,238 to a global community of 25,166 people.

Are you as excited about data as we are? Join me at GitHub Universe for a fireside chat with Rachel Potvin, VP of Engineering for Data at GitHub, and Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst and Co-founder of RedMonk, where we’ll take a deep dive on the findings in this year’s report. The livestream starts at 2:10 pm PT on November 13. Make sure to tune in at githubuniverse.com.

Written by

Cathy Zhou

@CathyZhou0120