#GitHubUniverse: Nigeria is Fourth Fastest Growing Country-Community on GitHub

It’s no longer news that the GitHub Universe developer conference is one of the biggest tech conferences in the world. The conference, now in its 10th edition, is organised for programmers who use the GitHub software repository platform to share and manage their codes.

So yeah, it’s a very esoteric and technical event. But the event highlighted some important stats about Nigerian developers that are truly, well, mind-blowing.

#Nigeria 's growth on GitHub in the 2018 State of the Octoverse pic.twitter.com/sj6gctSqrK

— Mercy Orangi (@mercy_orangi) October 16, 2018

Here are a few of them.

Nigeria has 4th highest number of New GitHub Users

According to data released by GitHub at the event, Nigeria is now one countries where the highest number of new GitHub members come from.

Here are the fastest growing communities by country at the state of the octoverse keynote #githubuniverse pic.twitter.com/0Oycje52yH

— Shilla Saebi 🥑 (@ShillaSaebi) October 16, 2018

This is actually very impressive because GitHub is not a traditional software, neither is it a social media platform. It is a serious environment where users are willing, not only to read other users’ codes, but also to contribute their own.

It’s a welcome development because the rising number of Nigerian users could influence GitHub to develop more tooling and support programs for the Nigerian community.

8^th Highest Number of New Repos Created

Repos, short for ‘repositories,’ is a digital directory where programmers organise their code. They’re basically project folders. According to GitHub, Nigerian developers rank 8^th  on the log for amount of new repos.

What this means is that Nigerian developers are starting new and innovative projects at an impressive pace.

5^th Highest Number of Open Source Projects

One of the most important reasons people use GitHub is so they can easily use code written by other developers. A lot of developers go there to download Repos and do not even bother to give proper attribution or contribute their own.

But Nigerian developers are gradually breaking away from this culture. Nigerian developers are now more willing to share their code for others to use.

It doesn’t end there because by making their codes open source it becomes easier to get suggestions and support from other developers. And if a project/repository has potentials, a community is formed around it.

These few strides indicate just how much innovation and community thinking is rising in Nigeria. No wonder Nigeria is witnessing startup development for years now. Hopefully, by next year we would start ranking number 1 in some of these categories.