The Global Growth of Developers and the Rise of Generative AI
The Global Growth of Developers and the Rise of AI in Open Source
This newsletter edition is about some highlights from the Octoverse: The state of open source and rise of AI in 2023 report.
Strong growth of number of developers: The global developer community is experiencing significant growth, with notable increases in Africa and India. This expansion is not limited to these regions, as the US and European countries such as Spain, Portugal, Poland, Germany, Italy, France, and the United Kingdom are also witnessing a surge in their developer populations. The overall number of developers on GitHub grew by 26% (US 21%, India 36%, Nigeria 45%, Brazil 30%, France 22%, Spain 25% and Germany 22%).
TypeScript is third most popular language: The programming landscape is evolving with TypeScript emerging as the third most popular language across open source projects on GitHub. This trend is a testament to the language's robustness and versatility. Another language gaining traction is Rust, which has found its way into the Linux kernel and is increasingly favored by developers worldwide.
Comment: Maybe it is worth to think about starting to think about a Clean TypeScript Style Guide similar to the guides already available for JavaScript and ABAP. Leave a comment to express your thoughts.
Rise of generative AI projects: The rise of generative AI projects on GitHub is another trend worth noting. The graphic shows a dramatic growth of AI related projects on GitHub to more than 60000 projects.
92% are using already AI based coding tools AI-based coding tools are becoming a staple in the developer's toolkit, with 92% of developers already using these tools.
Comment: While there are some studies on the improvement on developer productivity, there is also the currently unmet need for a more in-depth understanding of the impact of AI on the whole system of software engineering. What is impact on technical debt? What is the impact on quality and security? Will developers get overconfident in the results and do less vigorous code reviews? How high is the degree of usefulness of generative AI depending on the detailed task context (e.g. GenAI is probably less useful in unreadable and tightly couple code). -GitHub Actions Developers are also leveraging GitHub Actions beyond continuous delivery to automate their workflows, enhancing efficiency and productivity.
Comment: Personally I have used Generative AI and GitHub Actions to automate my very job-specific workflows, for which I did not have the time yet to automate.
Infrastructure as code The adoption of Dockerfiles in repositories is another trend that stood out in 2023. With 4.3 million repositories using Dockerfiles and over 1 million repositories using Dockerfiles for creating containers, it's clear that developers are standardizing cloud deployments through Infrastructure as Code (IaC) practices.
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