Nigerian developers are one of the highest contributors to the Git-Hub repository in 2020. According to the recently released State of the Octoverse, contributions by Nigerian developers grew by a record 65.9% in the last year – the highest percentage growth by any country in the world.
GitHub is a code hosting platform for version control and collaboration. It lets you and others work together on projects from anywhere.
The huge growth in the country was attributed to several developer internships like HNG and Wejapa that saw a higher number of applications this year, according to a senior developer. These internships use Git-Hub as the repository for their programs.
In general, over 60 million new repositories were created across the world in 2020. This is 35% more than total repositories created last year.
A break down of all the contributions to the repositories shows that over 1.9 billion contributions were made in total in the last 12 months. Of the total recorded, the contribution to open-source projects increased by 25%.
The increase in numbers was attributed to the fact that developers from all corners of the world worked more and worked more together to innovate, connect, and solve problems.
Related post: Africa Now Has 700,000 Professional Software Developers, Only 21% are Women- Google/IFC Report
COVID-19 Sparks rise of open source projects
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic early in the year had its positive impact on software development across the world. With everyone forced to stay home, developers around the world have found connection and community through open source.
Majorly, open source for good projects like COVID-19 saw explosive growth, gathering over 5,600 repositories and presenting exciting new opportunities for users to get engaged in open source communities.
Other open-source projects that thrived are dataworkshop with about 1,008 repositories, angular9 (753), bsa (560) and vercel (557).
Africa contributed 2% of Active Global users
Over the course of the year, the number of users on GitHub grew in size and diversity to reach 56 Million globally. Africa contributed just 2% active users, a 0.3% increase from last year.
North America was the highest contributor in terms of users with 34% followed by Asia with 30.7% and Europe with 26.8%. In terms of companies, 72% of Fortune 50 companies use the GitHub Enterprise.
The users on the platform are not just developers, research by Git-Hub shows that there are other professionals like designers, data, scientists, education, managers, and cryptocurrency.
However, developers remain the largest category of users on GitHub,
though their number decreased from a high of 60% in 2016 to 54% in 2020. Education comes in second with 23%, up from 17% recorded in 2016. The third-largest category is data, with just 10% of users in 2020. The report also showed that there are users with more than one classification.
Suggested read: Nigerian Developers Accuse WeJapa CEO, Favour Ori of Extortion and Underpayment for Jobs
Top Languages in 2020
According to the report, several coding languages were popular among developers during the year.
The top 10 languages according to Git-hub include Ruby, Objective-C, Shell, C, C++, PHP, C#, TypeScript, Java, Python and JavaScript.
In summary,
Collaboration among developers across the world reached an all-time high in 2020. Although the tragedy of the Covid-19 pushed economies to the wall, it helped bring developers together to find solutions to the problems that arose.
Symbolically, Nigeria was recognised as one of the highest contributors to this growth.
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