GitHub Octoverse 2021: Developer diversity is increasing, code is shipping faster than ever

The 2021 edition of GitHub’s annual Octoverse report highlights a welcome increase in the diversity of the developer community alongside many other interesting trends.

According to the report, almost 60 percent of active GitHub users are now distributed outside North America. The world’s largest repo service is seeing the fastest user growth in Indonesia, Brazil, India, Russia, Japan, Germany, Canada, the UK, and China.

Developers are both writing and shipping code...

16 November 2021 | Git

Google slashes its Play Store cut for more developers

Google has announced that it’s following the industry trend and slashing its cut of Play Store sales for more developers.

The previous 70/30 cut was once the industry standard for app stores but has faced increasing backlash over the years from both developers and regulators. Critics have long argued that the stores have abused their market position to take an unfair cut.

Epic Games was the first major player to disrupt the model with the launch of the Epic Store,...

25 October 2021 | Android

GitHub Discussions exits beta to help boost developer communities

GitHub’s collaboration-driving feature Discussions is exiting beta to help developer communities thrive.

Discussions enable developers to make repos fun, collaborative, and engaging spaces with features like the ability to pin big announcements, label discussions, mark the most helpful answers, personalise categories, and respond on-the-go via mobile.

Later this year, GitHub will be adding two more features:

Ask your community with polls. With the new Polls...

18 August 2021 | Git

APImetrics launches premium API performance monitoring service

APImetrics has launched a premium version of API.expert, a service that monitors over 2000 APIs across many vertical markets.

The service is $100 per year and enables developers to keep track of the performance from mainstream API providers such as Netflix, Slack, and Microsoft, to more specialist and smaller vendors.

David O'Neill, CEO of APImetrics, said;

“APIs have become an essential part of the tech landscape, with more and more critical and essential...

25 June 2021 | API

65% of companies are concerned about the wellbeing of developers

Research conducted by Forrester Consulting has found that a majority of companies are concerned about the wellbeing of developers.

The research, commissioned by The Qt Company, also highlighted that 75 percent of connected device manufacturers are finding the demand for skills is outstripping supply.

“All too often native development for individual chipsets leads to isolated pockets of skills that are hard to transfer to new platforms,” said Marko Kaasila, SVP of...

22 June 2021 | Developer

Google’s latest framework aims to prevent SolarWinds-like supply chain attacks

Google has unveiled a new framework called Supply chain Levels for Software Artifacts, or SLSA (pronounced "salsa").

The intention of SLSA is to help prevent the growing number of devastating supply chain attacks in recent years—such as the SolarWinds and CodeCov hacks.

Google describes SLSA as "an end-to-end framework for ensuring the integrity of software artifacts throughout the software supply chain."

The company says that SLSA is inspired by its own...

18 June 2021 | Frameworks

Programming language Coq wants to change its name for obvious reasons

Programming language Coq is looking to rebrand due to sounding like the English slang term for a certain male anatomy body part.

Coq is a dependently-typed functional programming language first created by Gérard Huet and Thierry Coquand. The development of Coq has been supported since 1984 by INRIA, École Polytechnique, University of Paris-Sud, Paris Diderot University, and CNRS.

However, the name of the language and its association with the male anatomy has supposedly...

15 June 2021 | Languages

Google is surveying developers to find the OEMs that aggressively kill apps

Google is surveying its developer community as part of what appears to be a bid to crackdown on OEMs that aggressively kill apps.

Key factors in most consumers’ smartphone purchase decisions include how fast the device feels and its battery life. To make their devices feel snappy and full of life, OEMs often aggressively kill apps more than Google intended.

Google doesn’t seem happy about that. And it shouldn’t be, the company has put a lot of work into features...

14 June 2021 | Android

SlashData: JavaScript and Python boast largest developer communities

A new report from SlashData highlights the huge growth in the global developer community over the past six months.

The developer economy research specialists estimate there are now 24.3 million global developers, as of Q1 2021. This has increased by around 14 percent from 21.3 million in October 2020.

JavaScript continues to attract new developers with around 1.4 million more than six months ago. The language also has, by some distance, the largest developer community at...

27 April 2021 | Java

Zoom is pumping $100M into advancing its third-party app ecosystem

Zoom is building on the momentum it’s gained over the past year with the launch of a $100 million fund to advance its third-party ecosystem.

During 2020, Zoom's business customer base grew by 470.33 percent. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Zoom's business customer base had grown 217.44 percent across the two years between January 2018 and 2019.

Third-party app developers have been sharing in the company’s success through Zoom Apps, which were first announced during...

19 April 2021 | Platforms