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GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

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Re: GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

#31
post #27

Wow, that number almost doesn't seem believable. A million people must be a good chunk of all programmers in the world. This Wikipedia article[1] says there are 612,000 programmers in the US and 522,000 in India. Admittedly old incomplete data but it's easy to see how a million people might be 10-20% of all programmers worldwide. In corporate drone offices I've been in my guess is maybe 10% of programmers have even h…

I imagine there's also a small, but non-trivial number of people on GitHub who wouldn't be readily identified as programmers. For example, I'm acquainted with a civil engineer that's on GitHub so he can contribute to software used with his astronomy hobby.

Re: GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

#32
post #21
post #16

How are they measuring users here? Is this all-time-registrations? Or "actives"? Because if this is registrations, I thought they were a lot bigger already. Regardless, awesome!

>Because if this is registrations, I thought they were a lot bigger already. No way. How many programmers are there in the first place? I bet you it's EDIT: Back of the envelope by other people put it between http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer... Under that perspective, one could say that Github has captured the attention of 4-8% of everyone capable of understanding the app.

And we all know the wildly varying calibre of people with "programmer" or "software engineer" type titles ("Source control? Which key is that?"). I wouldn't be too surprised if it was more like 10% of those capable...

Re: GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

#33
post #27

Wow, that number almost doesn't seem believable. A million people must be a good chunk of all programmers in the world. This Wikipedia article[1] says there are 612,000 programmers in the US and 522,000 in India. Admittedly old incomplete data but it's easy to see how a million people might be 10-20% of all programmers worldwide. In corporate drone offices I've been in my guess is maybe 10% of programmers have even h…

Do you need an account to be able to report issues or watch projects? Interested bystanders and responsible bug-reporting OSS citizens may account for some of that.

I wonder how many of those accounts have active repos of their own?

Re: GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

#35
post #33
post #27

Wow, that number almost doesn't seem believable. A million people must be a good chunk of all programmers in the world. This Wikipedia article[1] says there are 612,000 programmers in the US and 522,000 in India. Admittedly old incomplete data but it's easy to see how a million people might be 10-20% of all programmers worldwide. In corporate drone offices I've been in my guess is maybe 10% of programmers have even h…

Do you need an account to be able to report issues or watch projects? Interested bystanders and responsible bug-reporting OSS citizens may account for some of that. I wonder how many of those accounts have active repos of their own?

I would wonder how many of those accounts have pushed to a repo recently, not just their own (in cases where people work for a company/on a project that has a GitHub organization).

Re: GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

#36
post #21
post #16

How are they measuring users here? Is this all-time-registrations? Or "actives"? Because if this is registrations, I thought they were a lot bigger already. Regardless, awesome!

>Because if this is registrations, I thought they were a lot bigger already. No way. How many programmers are there in the first place? I bet you it's EDIT: Back of the envelope by other people put it between http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer... Under that perspective, one could say that Github has captured the attention of 4-8% of everyone capable of understanding the app.

I think it depends on how you define programmer. If you are just looking at people who write scrips or excel macro's etc then it might be as high as: 6billion people * 1/3 have computers * 25% of computer users write scrips = 500 million people. Or you could limit it to people who have software developer or programmer etc as part of their job title and then it's probably below 20 million.

PS: Personally, I rather prefer the most inclusive version which includes people who simply train their outlook to auto sort their mail etc. In the early days of computing there was little that separated users from programmers and I like to think we are heading back in that direction. If for no other reason than I like the idea of the maximum number of people learning how to work though problems logically.

Re: GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

#37
post #3

They provide a great service, and I use them all the time, but I don't like how their pricing scheme works for freelancers. You end up with a million small private repositories, and BitBucket has much more reasonable options.

Another new service on the scene, providing cheap unlimited git hosting repositories, is sourcehold.com specifically to help solve this problem. Full Disclosure: I am writing it, and it is still in beta.

Unlimited? You may want to rethink your business model.

Re: GitHub Hits 1,000,000 users

#39
post #36
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Because if this is registrations, I thought they were a lot bigger already. No way. How many programmers are there in the first place? I bet you it's EDIT: Back of the envelope by other people put it between http://stackoverflow.com/questions/453880/how-many-developer... Under that perspective, one could say that Github has captured the attention of 4-8% of everyone capable of understanding the app.

I think it depends on how you define programmer. If you are just looking at people who write scrips or excel macro's etc then it might be as high as: 6billion people * 1/3 have computers * 25% of computer users write scrips = 500 million people. Or you could limit it to people who have software developer or programmer etc as part of their job title and then it's probably below 20 million. PS: Personally, I rather pre…

Fortunately, in this case we're clearly talking about people who understand what source control is and have a desire to use it ;).
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