GitHub Reports on the 2021 State of the Octoverse

GitHub has released its annual State of the Octoverse, which combines telemetry from more than 4 million repositories and surveys from more than 12,000 developers. This year, the study explored data in the areas of writing and shipping code faster, creating documentation to support developers, and supporting sustainable communities.

In terms of writing code, “better information flow is key to a better culture,” and better tools empower developers to do their work and feel fulfilled, the report says. It also cited frictionless code reuse and searchable repositories as key to facilitating development. 

“Developers’ performance at work can increase by up to 87% when reusing others’ code is easy and doesn’t introduce friction. The benefits of frictionless code reuse are striking for open source projects, too — projects see 2x performance compared to those with more friction, like slow processes or multiple approval layers,” the report states.

The study also looked at where developers work and what that means for collaboration. 
Specifically: 

  • 41 percent of developers were co-located (that is, in an office all the time or part-time) before the pandemic, but only 11 percent expect to be co-located after the pandemic.
  • 28 percent reported a hybrid environment (with some team members in an office and others remote) before, and 47 percent expect the same after the pandemic.
  • 26 percent were fully remote before, and 38 percent expect to be fully remote after.

“Merging pull requests, deploying code through pipelines, and organizing work" along the model of open source projects, become especially important when some or all of the team works remotely, the report states. 

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