Top 3 Takeaways from Octoverse 2021

Every year, GitHub publishes a “State of the Octoverse” report. Every year, the report yields fresh and important insights about where developers are, what they care about, how they work, and where the developer trends are going. This year’s report is no exception.

In an increasingly technology-driven world, developers are the most important people (or persona) to understand, because they are the builders and kingmakers of technology. That’s why I wrote a four-part series last year on these developers’ Global by Nature characteristics. That’s also why I dove deep into the 2020 State of the Octoverse report earlier this year to see “Where Will the Next 50 Million Developers Come From?”

This post is a continuation of this developer-focused exploration, where I share my top 3 takeaways from the 2021 State of the Octoverse report.

(Disclaimer: views expressed in this post and elsewhere on Interconnected are all personal opinions. They do not represent GitHub, which happens to be my employer at the time of this writing. I also did not participate in the research or production of the 2021 State of the Octoverse report.)

The Million-Plus Developers Club

The big headline of Octoverse 2021 is GitHub reaching 73 million developers on its platform worldwide. The more interesting number is the market-by-market, location-by-location breakdown of where these developers are coming from. It is the first time this report published these raw user numbers. (In last year’s report, the comparison was a ranking based on percentages of open source contribution, e.g. by the year 2020, the percentage of open source contribution from the US was 22.7%, followed by China’s 9.76% and India’s 5.2%.)

From these raw numbers emerge what I call the “Million-Plus Developers Club”, i.e. countries that have produced more than 1 million developers who are using GitHub. Here’s a list of the “club members” and their developer numbers:

1. United States: 13,551,846
2. People’s Republic of China: 7,555,311
3. India: 7,210,455
4. Brazil: 2,369,096
5. United Kingdom: 2,276,780
6. Russia Federation: 1,981,853
7. Germany: 1,929,413
8. Japan: 1,747,877
9. Canada: 1,636,278
10. Indonesia: 1,629,831
11. France: 1,541,090
12. South Korea: 1,239,541

Below is the Octoverse 2021 graphic (can be easily mistaken for a piece of abstract art)  illustrating this global distribution of developers with the apt anchor tag “#future”.

There are a couple of points worth unpacking from this list. First, there is a large separation of developer numbers between the top 3 countries -- the US, China, India -- and the other countries. They are the “Elite 3”.

Second, while we can interpret most of the “club members” as simply having large populations, some of them are punching above their demographic weight. South Korea is one example, ranking #28 in total population worldwide but has more than 1.2 million developers. Canada is even more so, ranking #39 in total population but has more than 1.6 million developers. On the other hand, Indonesia, whose presence on this list may surprise some readers, already ranks #4 in total population.

P0: Innovation and Global Collaboration

Interconnected with the increasingly global distribution of developers is these developers’ desire to innovate via global-scale collaboration -- a hallmark of the open source development model. This insight may feel intuitive, but Octoverse 2021 backed it up with survey data that included 38,000 developers. More than 25,000 of the surveyed developers essentially indicated the “ability to innovate and tinker” and “global collaboration” as both top priorities, thus the “P0” designation.

(For readers who don’t work in the enterprise software industry, P0 is an often-used notation that signifies “top priority”, whether it's a technical issue, customer request, or user feedback. In computer science, counting begins with 0, not 1.)

Putting the best minds around the world together to collaborate and innovate may seem like a no-brainer, especially given the maturing model of open source, but geopolitics can get in the way. For developers who live in countries that have an uneasy relationship with the West, not being able to access open source technology and collaborate with other developers is a common fear and concern. Thus, surfacing the issue of wanting more “global collaboration” is both a desire for the future and reaction to the present.

One of the top five issues surfaced in this survey is:

Government investment in and contribution to open source projects.

Implicit in this issue is a call to governments and policymakers around the world to better understand and participate in open source, not stand in its way, either intentionally or inadvertently. Frustrating the organic global scale of open source collaboration will only frustrate the most productive and innovative people of these countries -- their developers.

Documentation (Finally) Elevated

Good documentation in technology is often undervalued, and the technical writers who write them are usually underappreciated. Octoverse 2021 is finally highlighting the value of documentation front and center.

The fastest way to accelerate innovation and progress is to build on top of the work of others. Based on the data gathered in Octoverse 2021, developers see a 50% productivity boost when they have easy-to-source documentation to work with. This takeaway is applicable whether we are talking about open source work or proprietary work within a company or a research lab. That’s because just sharing the code is not enough, not even close. Code is unusable if there's nothing to explain how and why it works, as well as what larger purpose it is supposed to serve. That’s where good documentation comes in.

Well-written and well-structured documentation also scales well globally. Regardless of where a developer comes from, her first stop is the documentation page. If the page is clear enough for her to learn and try your technology, you’ve won. If the page is terribly written or constructed, she will bounce and you’ve likely lost her forever. That’s why the most common advice I give to early-stage startup teams is to focus on building your documentation just as much as your codebase. (If you need a 101 on how to write good documentation, see my previous writing on opensource.com.)

As Octoverse 2021 succinctly summarized, high-quality documentation is a win-win proposition. That means innovation not only requires more developers who can write in computer languages, but also more technical writers who can write in human languages to explain what the developers are building -- globally.

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