On October 16, GitHub, the world’s developer mecca, released its annual Octoverse report, which takes stock of what 31 million developers have done on GitHub over the past year, and how far it has come. Looking through this year’s annual report, Octoverse 2018 is all about more developer collaboration and more projects than ever before.

31 million + developers

As of October 2018, there are 31 million + developers using GitHub, 80% of which are from outside the US, and the number of users is growing steadily.

Eight million new developers joined GitHub in the past year, more than in the first six years of GitHub’s existence combined.

Most of the growth came from the United States, China and India. Here are the top 10 countries with the most new users:

The number of unique contributors on GitHub in 2018 was 1.6 times higher than in 2017. The top five countries with the largest number of contributors are the US, China, India, the UK and Germany. Here are the top 20 countries or regions:

GitHub also put together a list of the most popular emoji programmers used on the platform in 2018, with the top thumb emoji being used 3.5 million times. Here are the six most used emoji:

And the distribution of emojis by programming language developers, with Ruby receiving the most attention:

Too real!

2.1 million + institutions

More than 2.1 million organizations use GitHub for both public and private warehouses, up 40 percent from 2017.

The number of institutional accounts on GitHub also grew much faster this year than in 2017, especially in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Here are the 10 fastest growing countries:

96 million + warehouse

As of September 30, 2018, more than 96 million warehouses were hosted on GitHub, up more than 40% from last year, with one-third of them created in the past 12 months, with the fastest growth coming from Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.

Here are the 10 countries with the fastest growth in the number of warehouses:

VS Code, React and Tensorflow once again make the list of open source projects by number of contributors. Here are the top 10 open source projects:

At the beginning of this year, following the emergence and popularity of wechat official mini-game “Tiaotiao”, the project “Wechat” Tiaotiao “Python Auxiliary” was listed in the list of interesting open source projects this year. Here are GitHub’s top 5 interesting new open source projects:

Every year, millions of developers support open source development on GitHub, from companies and universities. The top 10 organizations with the highest number of open source contributors in 2018 are all based in the United States. They are:

Meanwhile, GitHub has revealed the top 10 most used programming languages on the platform over the past year, with JavaScript, Java and Python remaining in the top three. Here are the 10 most used languages on GitHub over the past four years and how they’ve changed:

200 million + a pull request

Since GitHub launched Pull Request 2.0 in 2010, the community has opened more than 200 million pull requests, one-third of which have occurred in the past 12 months. The 200 millionth Pull Request occurred with the project Vuetify, a semantic component framework for Vue.

5 million + vulnerability alerts

Since GitHub launched its security alert feature in November 2017, it has sent 5 million + bug alerts to developers’ open source projects, 800,000 of which have been resolved.

In 2018, an average of 150 hackers helped GitHub solve problems every six days. This year, researchers and developers won $300,000 on GitHub through the Bug Bounty Program.

And, here are some interesting findings:

  • Developers from the Czech Republic are the most talkative on GitHub, followed by Switzerland and Germany. Here are the 10 most chatty countries in the open warehouse:

  • Developers around the world also take time off, and programmer breaks in each country coincide with local holidays, such as the Chinese Lunar New Year and The Indian Diwali festival, when programmers in both countries use GitHub events for health. Activity on GitHub is also lower on May 1, when more than 80 countries observe International Labor Day. Of course, the quietest time of year on GitHub is January 1, the Gregorian New Year.

Here’s how active developers are on GitHub by continent by time of year:

  • Which day of the week is the most popular on GitHub? This year’s annual report shows that Tuesdays through Thursdays are the three most active days of the week. In addition, the types of warehouses active during the week and on weekends are different: the open and private warehouses are more active during the week than open source projects, but the open source projects are much more active during the weekend.

Those are the highlights of GitHub’s 2018 annual report. What have you learned on GitHub in the past year? What interesting things happened? Feel free to share in the comments section.