GitHub’s latest State of the Octoverse has been released, offering developer insights for a year which has been unlike any other.
Fortunately, software development is one industry which could adapt quickly to the unique circumstances brought about by the pandemic. Many developers already work remotely so, for some, minimal-to-no changes were required to their working habits during lockdowns.
56 million developers used GitHub in 2020—making over 1.9 billion contributions and creating 60 million new repositories. GitHub is aiming to reach 100 million developers by 2025.
While political divisions from the pandemic and the US election damaged many communities, developers came together from around the world to help solve global problems.
35 percent more repositories were created than last year, showing that not even a pandemic can hold developers back. In fact, GitHub noted an increase in development work—both time spent and amount of work—across all investigated time zones.
OSS for Good projects have exploded in popularity this year. GitHub says that trending topics have included COVID-19 (duh!), dataworkshop, angular9, bsa20, and vercel.
Time spent on development dropped on weekends. That’s unsurprising, but what’s interesting is that activity on open-source jumped on weekends. GitHub suggests that it indicates developers are turning to open-source as not just a way to help build and learn, but also to escape from their usual work.
The most popular languages for 2020 include Python, JavaScript, Java, Typescript, C#, PHP, C++, C, Shell, Ruby, and Objective-C.
Python’s increasing popularity won’t come as any shock to Developer readers.
Last month, Python stole Java’s crown in the TIOBE Index for the first time. Python was just behind JavaScript in second place in Redmonk’s rankings in July. Python also led IEEE Spectrum’s rankings.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably had some idea of Python’s popularity even without the aforementioned rankings. The latest GitHub Octoverse just gives extra confirmation that 2020 has been a great year for Python proponents.
Security in open-source requires more work, especially in vulnerability detection. Vulnerabilities can often go undetected for more than four years. Most vulnerabilities (~83%) are not the result of malicious intent but instead arise from accidental mistakes.
Many projects can end up with vulnerabilities through the use of open-source components—with GitHub saying that 94 percent of projects rely on such components. The most frequent use of open source dependencies are found in JavaScript (94%), Ruby (90%), and .NET (90%) projects.
You can find the full GitHub State of the Octoverse report here.
(Photo by Clay Banks on Unsplash)
