Developers
The ever-growing developer community
GitHub is the de facto standard for all open source software. Developers know how to use GitHub from day one, which means they can be productive sooner.
Jordan Carroll, Senior Software Engineer // Fullstory
This year, more than 90 million people used GitHub. To put that into perspective: If GitHub were a country, it would have a bigger population than the entire nation of Germany.
And as the number of developers on GitHub grows, developer productivity and satisfaction have also increased—which we found to be the top KPIs for developers and leaders in our own internal research.
- 94M developers with 27% year-over-year growth
- 20.5M+ new developers joined GitHub in 2022
- 85.7M+ new repositories with 20% year-over-year growth
- 3.5B+ total contributions to all projects on GitHub*
*Contributions include commits, issues, pull requests, discussions, gists, pushes, and pull requests reviews.
More developers get more done together
With more developers than ever building software together on GitHub, we’ve seen a corresponding increase in overall productivity metrics too.
Whether developers are using GitHub Copilot to code faster or GitHub Actions to automate workflows, the gains in developer productivity are having a material impact.
- 227M+ pull requests merged
- 31M+ issues closed
- 263M automated jobs run on GitHub Actions every month*
*With more than 41 million build minutes a day
AI is speeding up coding
At GitHub, we use the SPACE productivity framework to gauge developers’ perceived productivity. This year, we studied the impact GitHub Copilot—our AI coding assistant—has on developer productivity and satisfaction.
Our findings: Developers finish tasks faster, feel happier, and say they can stay in the flow longer when using an AI tool like GitHub Copilot.
Copilot
Build faster with GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programming tool that suggests lines of code and entire functions—right from your editor. Plus, it’s free for verified students and maintainers of popular open source projects.
Developers contribute more to private projects
In 2022, just over 20% of all contributions on GitHub were in public repositories—meaning the vast majority of developers with free, Team, and GitHub Enterprise Cloud accounts are working in private repositories showing the sheer volume of activity on GitHub.
This shows a significant uptick in the total number of private repositories across GitHub since we started offering them to GitHub Free accounts in 2019. Moreover, the number of contributions to private repositories rose almost 38% compared to 2021.
Among public open source projects, we saw an almost 20% increase in contributions year over year with more than 3.5 billion contributions in 2022 alone.
Communities are keeping themselves more secure
Communities across GitHub are getting a lot better at securing their dependencies and fixing vulnerabilities. But it’s not only that developers on GitHub are getting more secure—it’s that far more developers are fixing vulnerabilities.
In 2022, we saw developers update 50% more vulnerable packages than in 2021, helping to secure 18 million projects on GitHub. Our data shows this is largely because of our free security tools and data like Dependabot and the Advisory Database. Developers also have an array of free GitHub resources and tools to prevent vulnerabilities or leaked credentials like code scanning, the Security Lab’s office hours, and secret scanning, which GitHub includes on all open source repositories.
Advanced Security
Stay secure at every step
Learn how open source communities and companies are securing code with GitHub Advanced Security. And if you’re an open source maintainer, check out our office hours with the GitHub Security Lab.
