Location-Based Analysis of Developers and Technologies on GitHub

Abstract

GitHub is a popular platform for collaboration on open source projects. It also provides a rich API to query various aspects of the public activity. This combination of a popular social coding website with a rich API presents an opportunity for researchers to gather empirical data about software development practices. There are an overwhelmingly large number of competing platforms to choose from in software development. Knowing which are gaining widespread adoption is valuable both for individual developers trying to increase their employability, as well as software engineers deciding which technology to use in their next big project. In terms of a developer's employability and an employer's ability to find available developers in their economic region, it is important to identify the most common technologies by geographic location. In this paper, analyses are done on GitHub data taking into account the developers' location and their technology usage. A web-based tool has been developed to interact with and visualize this data. In its current state of development, the tool summarizes the amount of code developers have in their public repositories broken down by programming language, and summarizes data about programmers using specific programming languages. This allows website visitors to get an immediate picture of the programming language usage in their region of interest. Future research could expand this work to technologies beyond programming languages such as frameworks and libraries.