GitHub will be at AWS re:Invent from November 26-30 in Las Vegas, Nevada. We can’t wait to see you there.

GitHub and AWS

GitHub works alongside AWS, so your team can collaborate quickly and securely with the tools they already use. With GitHub and AWS, you can integrate existing workflows and save time to focus on what’s important: your code. At AWS re:Invent, we’re hosting events throughout the week to help you learn how GitHub and AWS work together. Join us to see what’s new!

Check out our booth

Find us at booth #807 near the entrance of the Expo at the Venetian. Be sure to save your seat and stop by for one of several booth sessions, including:

• Deploy to Lambda with GitHub and Jenkins
• Your first GitHub Action: Deploying to AWS
• AWS Security Automation Orchestration (SAO) and GitHub
• Rise of the Machines: How GitHub Uses Machine Learning to Improve Software Development

Meet with GitHub Engineers

Schedule 1:1 meetings with GitHub Solutions Engineers to ask for advice and get in-depth information on how GitHub works for businesses.

Learn about GitHub Enterprise on AWS

In a featured session, Cox Automotive will share their experience running GitHub Enterprise on AWS. They’ll discuss their GitHub Enterprise environment and share how they’ve improved their processes for managing GitHub Enterprise on AWS with Terraform.

To attend this session, join us on Monday, November 26 at 4:45 pm PT at the Venetian, Level 2, Titian 2205-T2. Look for session ENT356-S in the event catalog to register.

For more details about the event follow @GitHub and tag us with #reinvent. We hope to see you in Las Vegas!

Since launching the new GitHub Desktop in 2017, we’ve focused on improving collaboration in the app, laying the foundation how you can work with Desktop today.

• Earlier this year, we launched Desktop 1.2 and 1.3, providing you with the ability to compare branches and get notified when the default branch has updates to pull into your branch.
• Last month, we released 1.4, providing information about whether or not you’ll encounter conflicts before merging.

Today, we’re releasing GitHub Desktop 1.5, representing a culmination of the work we’ve been doing this past year. This release completes the merge collaboration cycle by providing a way to initiate a merge in the branch dropdown, guiding you through resolving merge conflicts, and informing you when a merge is complete. It also includes our first step toward improving onboarding onto GitHub Desktop with the option to clone and add new repositories in the repository dropdown.

Merge conflict resolution

With today’s GitHub Desktop release, you can merge with confidence knowing that even if conflicts occur, we’ll help you through it so you can keep shipping. Merge conflicts can be intimidating for new developers, especially those working in teams. In our usability tests, the audible “NOOOOO” when encountering a conflict became predictable.

In our previous release, we reduced some of that anxiety by informing you whether or not you would encounter merge conflicts before merging, but you still needed to actually resolve the conflicts on your own. With more than 10 percent of all merges in the app resulting in merge conflicts, we knew we could do better. And with GitHub Desktop 1.5, you’re no longer on your own. The app will now inform you which files have conflicts, route you to your preferred editor to resolve them, list the conflicts that you still need to address, and show you when everything is resolved and ready to merge.

Listening to our users

As we’ve released features related to merging over the past several months, we’ve also had an opportunity to listen to lots of users. We care about your feedback, and this release incorporates several changes based on what we’ve learned from you. With GitHub Desktop 1.5, you can now initiate a merge from the branch dropdown, and you’ll receive feedback in the app to let you know when a merge is completed successfully.

We’ve also seen that the core function of adding a repository to Desktop has been difficult to find and use. We solved this by adding a simple way to create, add, or clone a repository right from the repository dropdown.

These changes are subtle, but together they represent our commitment to listen and learn from people using Desktop every day. We conduct user interviews and usability testing on a regular basis—if you’d like to participate and help make Desktop even more useful, please sign up.

Celebrating our open source contributors

Finally, we want to call out that this release is the first time we’ve shipped a feature iteration built almost entirely by community contributors outside of GitHub. The improved merge flow was a combined effort from @JQuinnie and @bruncun, and there were more than 30 merged pull requests from the community since our last release.

We continue to be blown away by the community that has grown around GitHub Desktop as an open source product. There were more community pull requests merged in September and October than in any previous months, and there’s no sign of slowing down. We’re grateful for the community’s participation in improving GitHub Desktop, and if you feel inspired to build something awesome together, we’d love to see you in our open source repository.

As we celebrate Code.gov’s second birthday, it seems like just yesterday Alvand Salehi was introducing Code.gov from the main stage at GitHub Universe. But now two years and over 5,200 projects later, Code.gov (and the Federal Source Code policy that created it) are starting to hit their stride. I wanted to take this opportunity to highlight some of the exciting government projects currently on GitHub, and dive into the data around how the government community uses GitHub to collaborate. Like the Code.gov team says, “[we] believe in innovation, and are passionate in making these open source projects all available to you.”

Government and open source

Out of the 4,800 publicly accessible government projects on Code.gov, more than 3,600 (or 75 percent) are hosted on GitHub.com. This makes sense, as the majority of the world’s open source already on GitHub. However, it’s also a pretty big deal. Government agencies like NASA and the U.S. Army are using GitHub to share their tools and resources with the greater open source community around the world. Take NASA’s 3D Resources project, for example.

Interested in textures, models, and images from NASA itself? The NASA-3D-Resources repository has it all, including pictures of earth from the Apollo missions and models of the satellite used in the Clementine mission.

You can’t 3D print your own Mars rover—yet. But with contributors like the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, “yet” may definitely be the operative word.

Another exciting government project is ZFS, a file system released by the Department of Energy that runs specifically on Linux. This open source project has not only been embraced by other agencies, but has been adopted by private companies as part of their day-to-day operations.

Notable adopters of ZFS on Linux include GE Healthcare Systems, Intel, and Netflix. As for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL)—the research facility answering to the Department of Energy and those behind this OSS—they continue to utilize ZFS, and continue to develop and improve the platform. LLNL is working closely with Intel to use a variation of ZFS-ZFS+Lustre—to manage the first planned U.S. exascale system, Aurora. Aurora is capable of a billion-billion calculations per second. (Yes, a billion-billion.) Aurora is slated for 2021 at Argonne National Lab.

How the government community uses GitHub

Aside from how the government is sharing projects, we also took a look at the numbers to find out how the community is using GitHub to collaborate on these projects.

Top 10 projects by stars

Ranking	Project	#
1	nasa/openmct	5282
2	USArmyResearchLab/Dshell	5098
3	scipy/scipy	5079
4	nasa/NASA-3D-Resources	1422
5	GSA/data	1353
6	GSA/data.gov	1278
7	Code-dot-mil/code.mil	1229
8	openscenegraph/OpenSceneGraph	1177
9	WhiteHouse/petitions	1777
10	NREL/api-umbrella	1172

Top 10 projects by forks

Ranking	Project	#
1	scipy/scipy	2556
2	USArmyResearchLab/Dshell	1164
3	openscenegraph/OpenSceneGraph	720
4	nasa/openmct	585
5	spack/spack	539
6	lammps/lammps	534
7	idaholab/moose	460
8	WhiteHouse/petitions	373
9	GSA/data.gov	356
10	materialsproject/pymatgen	309

Top 10 projects by watchers

Ranking	Project	#
1	USArmyResearchLab/Dshell	673
2	scipy/scipy	312
3	GSA/data.gov	251
4	nasa/openmct	233
5	nasa/NASA-3D-Resources	220
6	WhiteHouse/petitions	214
7	openscenegraph/OpenSceneGraph	201
8	18F/api-standards	173
9	nsacyber/Windows-Secure-Host-Baseline	172
10	Code-dot-mil/code.mil	169

Top 10 projects by contributors

Ranking	Project	#
1	scipy/scipy	669
2	trilinos/Trilinos	197
3	SchedMD/slurm	162
4	18F/18f.gsa.gov	139
5	Kitware/ParaView	136
6	GSA/wordpress-seo	119
7	department-of-veterans-affairs/vets-website	116
8	idaholab/moose	114
9	materialsproject/pymatgen	113
10	petsc/petsc	113

And more

Our top 10 findings are just a few examples of how government projects use GitHub. Looking deeper into the data can tell us even more about how they contribute to the entire open source community. With thousands on thousands of commits, many have sparked the attention of both the public and private sector:

• From the Environmental Protection Agency, WNTR (pronounced “winter”) is a Python package designed to simulate and analyze resilience of water distribution networks.
• The Department of Transportation’s ITS ODE offers real-time data to a network of vehicles, infrastructure, and traffic management centers, providing logistics to subscribing transportation management applications and other similar devices.
• Then there is Walkoff, from the National Security Agency, enabling security teams to automate and integrate apps, workflows, and analytics tools.

This is what Code.gov is all about. All of the government projects we’ve mentioned in this post are designated as open source. That means that you can access a repo, test, debug, submit pull requests, or download your own copy and adapt it for your own use.

As the Code.gov team has shared with us, they believe in innovation and providing everyone the opportunity to perform a civic duty on a digital platform. They’re passionate about making these open source government projects available for all. This spirit is embodied in their hashtag, seen often on their Twitter account: #CodeOn. The invitation to reach out to them on Twitter or LinkedIn is always open, and we highly encourage you to do so.

Want to learn more about Code.gov? Follow them on Medium and Twitter. You can also see what else GitHub is doing to help governments across the country and around the world.

Open source helps people create new and exciting things every day—including the code we used to collect data for this post. Check it out here.

Today we reached a major milestone: 100 million repositories now live on GitHub. Powering this number is an incredible community. Together, you’re 31 million developers from nearly every country and territory in the world, collaborating across 1.1 billion contributions.

Repositories are where you store code, but they represent much more: ideas, experiments, curiosity, and moments of inspiration. To celebrate, let’s take a look at a few trends and achievements, a core sample of what’s possible when we work together by the millions.

What’s behind 100 million?

To put this milestone into perspective, we totaled only about 33,000 repositories in 2008. Today, we’re seeing an average of 1.6 repositories created every second. In fact, nearly one third of all repositories were created in the last year alone—all thanks to the developers who choose to host, build, and share their work on GitHub.

Over the last 10 years, it’s been a pleasure to watch impactful projects build and grow on GitHub. Rails moved to Git and GitHub while the platform was still in private beta, and Node.js launched on GitHub in 2009. Since then, we’ve also had the opportunity to host Swift, .NET, and Python. Supported by thousands of contributors, these projects are raising the bar for how developer tools evolve and engage with their communities.

Just this year, we’ve seen countless projects take off, started by individuals and larger teams alike. Projects like Definitely Typed, Godot, Kubernetes, PyTorch, and more climbed our lists of top and fastest growing projects.

Top open source projects

Projects on this year’s lists have a theme: they make it easier to build software, whether through code editing, automation, containerization, or documentation.

Fastest growing open source projects

In the last year, we saw trends in growth of projects related to machine learning, game development, 3D printing, home automation, data analysis, and full-stack JavaScript development.

Popular repository topics

This year, the open source repositories you’ve created span thousands of topics, but these are the ones you contributed to the most:

Topics in front and backend JavaScript, machine learning, mobile app development, and containerization represent some of the most powerful trends in open source software in the last 12 months. In 2017, topics like “game”, “deep learning”, and “library” were also trending.

Where repositories are created

GitHub started with a small group of developers looking to solve a specific problem—now it’s home to a global open source community. And we’re seeing the proportion of open source contributors outside the U.S. grow every year.

As a continent, more repositories are coming from Asia than anywhere else in the world. More specifically, repository creation has picked up across Central Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. While there’s an increase in repositories from developed countries, we’re seeing the same trend in emerging countries as new tech communities grow and new technologies becoming more accessible.

Developers in Egypt, in particular, created twice as many public and private repositories this year. And in Nigeria, a growing developer community created 1.7x more open source repositories in 2018 than in 2017. To see why we think Nigeria has a tech community to watch, read our latest post on the region.

Fastest growing countries by repositories created (as of September 30)

Fastest growing countries by open source repositories created (as of September 30)

Thank you

After 10 years and 100 million repositories, we’re only just getting started. Thanks to our users, we’re building something bigger than any single repository or project—a community that’s pushing software forward in tangible ways. So thank you for building with us now and in the years to come. We can’t wait to see what you build together in the next 100 million.

Interested in seeing more insights into the GitHub community? Check out this year’s State of the Octoverse report.

This article is the first in a series based on The State of Octoverse—trends and insights into GitHub activity, the open source community, and more from the GitHub Data Science Team.

In February, we reflected on a trip to Nigeria and everything we learned about its growing tech community. Economic changes, expanding educational opportunities, and wider internet access are mobilizing a talented and entrepreneurial community. And together, they’re pushing software forward in Africa’s largest economy.

A growing developer community

On our trip, we saw this changing landscape close up at packed meetups and student groups. In our 2018 Octoverse Report, the numbers were clear. Across several measures, the developer community in Nigeria is growing fast. In 2018 alone, we’ve seen:

• 1.6x more developers contributing on GitHub.* Nigeria represents the fourth fastest growing developer community on GitHub with 1.6x as many contributors in 2018 than in 2017.
• 2.1x more organizations. Nigeria is high on our list of fastest growing countries by organizations created with 2.1x more organizations created this year than last year.
• 1.8x more repositories and 1.7x more open source repositories. Nigeria also made our list of fastest growing countries by repositories created, nearly doubling the number of projects they’re collaborating on.

To learn more about our data and methodologies, check out this year’s State of the Octoverse.

*We define contributors broadly as any user taking a substantive action on GitHub (pushed code, opened an issue, or merged a pull request, for example) that added new content to the platform in a public or private repository.

Growth behind the numbers

An important startup ecosystem

Behind our numbers is a young, growing community excited about software development and its potential to address some of the challenges Nigeria faces today. With excitement and opportunity comes an expanding startup ecosystem and the venture capital, accelerators, training programs, and hubs to support it.

Nigerian startups are growing accordingly across industries. The fintech industry is booming in particular, as a result of a changing financial landscape. According to Stephen O’Grady, Principal Analyst at Red Monk:

In 2016 and 2017, 42 percent of Nigerians had access to traditional financial services, which has lead to growth in projects that have tried to bring these to the Nigerian population. Without existing infrastructure, they have the opportunity to take the next step forward.

Nigeria still relies heavily on cash, but fintech companies like AmplifyPay, Paga, and PayStack (which you can find on GitHub) are streamlining the way people bank and gaining tens of thousands of individual and business users. With millions of dollars raised, these companies underscore an investment trend that has spread across African tech ecosystems, reaching a high of $195 million in 2017 alone. These startups have also spurred local developers to build an ecosystem of applications and integrations.

A supportive student community

Through GitHub Education and our global group of Campus Experts, we’ve had the opportunity to support Nigerian students building tech communities that train and mentor new developers within their schools. So far, we’ve watched local Campus Experts create summer coding camps for women, host and speak at national software summits with 1,000+ attendees, organize open source meetups, and more.

Learn more about our Campus Experts program

We’re excited to see what Nigeria’s growing developer community builds on GitHub into 2019 and beyond. Want to learn more? GitHub Data Scientist Anna Filippova and Red Monk Principal Analyst Stephen O’Grady chatted about why Nigeria is trending in a recent GitHub Universe session.

Stay tuned for more posts that dive into data on the GitHub Blog—or check out The State of the Octoverse to see what a community of 31 million developers can accomplish in a year.