What the 2018 GitHub Octoverse Reveals About Global Developer Trends

Global Programmer Portrait

Which country’s developers chat the most? Czech developers lead in public discussions on open‑source repositories.

Most used emojis among developers are the smiling face and the party popper. Emoji preferences vary by programming language; C# users favor a different smiley.

Typical work schedule shows peak activity between 10 am and 7 pm, with the highest concentration at 3 pm. Weekends are often spent contributing to open‑source projects, while Tuesdays to Thursdays dominate private project work. Activity dips during major holidays such as Chinese New Year and New Year’s Day.

Popular topics remain React, Android, and Node.js, with machine learning appearing among the top discussions.

Fastest‑growing topics include artificial intelligence, with PyTorch and machine learning projects ranking high. Other rapidly expanding areas are gaming, 3D printing, home automation, scientific computing, data analysis, and full‑stack JavaScript.

Top programming languages in 2018 are JavaScript, Java, and Python. JavaScript stays at the top, Java remains second, and Python holds third place since 2015. PHP is also popular; Ruby has slipped to tenth, while TypeScript entered the top ten.

Open‑Source Projects

Since its 2008 launch, GitHub hosts 96 million projects and 31 million users (up from 24 million the previous year). Microsoft acquired GitHub for $7.5 billion in June 2018.

210 million organizations use GitHub, a 40 % increase from 2017. About one‑third of the 96 million projects were created in the past year. The United States, China, and India contribute the most developers, with China moving to second place.

Asia leads in code contributions and open‑source project volume.

Microsoft now runs the largest open‑source projects and sees the fastest growth in open‑source documentation.

Most promising open‑source projects (top two) are machine‑learning focused:

google/dopamine – DeepMind’s reinforcement‑learning framework.

facebookresearch/Detectron – Facebook’s implementation of the Mask R‑CNN object detection algorithm.

Other notable projects include:

frappe/charts – a responsive JavaScript SVG chart library.

felixrieseberg/windows95 – runs Windows 95 inside an Electron app.

wangshub/wechat_jump_game – a cheat tool for the WeChat “Jump” game.

Major Version Updates

GitHub announced its largest update ever: the ability for anyone to run code directly on the platform via GitHub Actions . This feature lets users execute, test, and share code on GitHub servers without leaving the platform.

GitHub Actions includes 450 preset commands, Docker integration, and a “if‑this‑then‑that” style workflow system. It also introduces a Token scanning security feature that alerts developers when secret keys or passwords are inadvertently pushed to public repositories.

GitHub’s leadership describes this as the “biggest transformation in GitHub’s history.”

GitHub Connect

GitHub Connect provides a Unified Business Identity and Unified Search and Contributions, enabling seamless cross‑cloud account management, unified billing, licensing, permissions, and policy handling for enterprises.

The feature aims to break data silos and improve developer collaboration across public and private repositories.

Both GitHub Actions and GitHub Connect are currently in beta and will be rolled out to developers soon.

For more information, see the GitHub Actions beta page ( https://github.com/features/actions ) and the official documentation ( https://help.github.com/articles/customizing-your-project-with-github-actions/ ).

Original report: https://octoverse.github.com/