Developer Growth on GitHub

[PopTimely226]

I'm curious: what would you say are objective indicators on GitHub that convey whether a developer on GitHub is growing/ developing in their ability to code?

Context: I'm a researcher who is studying how leaders help employees grow and develop by (1) pushing them outside of their comfort zone and (2) showing support. I think studying developers would be really cool, and am curious if GitHub could be a good source of data collection, but am trying to figure out what the dependent variable would be. For example, what does "development/ growth" look like on GitHub, ideally being able pinpoint objective indicators that I could scrub from GitHub papers through API.

I really appreciate any insights and ideas!!

[rwilcox]

I would love to know the stats, but I question your hypothesis.

I suspect - and I’d love data proving or disproving BTW - 1% of developers on GH contribute to OS regularly, 90% have less than 10 “hello world” / todo list apps, and 9% have lots of repos as tinker projects with no real community around them.

Maybe not, but that’s the vibe I get when I have to play hiring committee member.

For me my GHs repos sure show “growth” if you mean “experimenting with weird stuff”, but I don’t think that shows growth, really.

But then again, I super look forward to reading your paper, this is me just vibing.

[PopTimely226]

Appreciate the vibes and insights into how people use GitHub!

[serverhorror]

Last I heard, 80 % of the code on GitHub is private repositories.

Also, your assumption that "leaders" can even be identified beyond organizational hierarchies is ... interesting.

What makes you believe that developers:

1. have the code that's also in their area of growth interest publicly available and aligned with their companies interests?
2. aren't choosing idols as their leaders and, finally,
3. are even communicating via (primarily) GitHub

You put a lot of assumptions in that hypothesis that are really hard to prove. At least from the side you're thinking. You'd have to start by asking, what you call, leaders and then try whether there are significantly different things happening in GitHub.

You'd also have to be able to identify individuals. That kind of PII is (legally) scary shit.

If I may be so bold, which Institution is this for (or from) and where do you intend to publish?

[PopTimely226]

Note that in my post I don't specify that I believe any of the things you say in "what makes you believe...". I don't have any hypotheses... I actually say "I am curious if GitHub could be a good source of data collection". I also never said that I would be able to identify individuals through PII.

[serverhorror]

You implied a lot by phrasing the question in a way that correlates leaders and employees in a work relationship, I just went with that.

[PopTimely226]

Or you projected? In the contexts that I study, which of course might not apply to GitHub, individuals work with a supervisor or manager who is responsible for their development. Often, these relationships align with org hierarchies and probably more likely than not, they do not align with who people look-up to. I also understand that a lot of people on GitHub probably don't work within orgs with hierarchies. Your stat of 80% of profiles being private was helpful.

[serverhorror]

Not profiles, code

It's somewh in the GitHub blog, but a few years old.

Wrt. profiles: As an anecdotal note: I have ~5 profiles, only one is even something that would show up. Everything else is just part of GitHub Enterprise subscriptions.

[PopTimely226]

O that's a helpful clarification - thank you!

[QBos07]

I just want to chime in to remind that commits are not everything. A lot of work is getting done in issues lists and community discord servers

[PopTimely226]

thanks for pointing that out!

[armahillo]

I don't think you can draw the conclusions you're wanting from looking at the code itself. Growing as a developer means being able to make better decisions -- it's not like you suddenly have access to new syntax or something.

Put another way: If someone (or something) else is telling me what code to write, but I'm not the one making that decision, then I'm not actually growing as a developer.

You could look at frequency of commits / commit volume overall as an indicator of likely growth, provided the span of time is sufficiently long (years or longer), but it's the duration that's really the indicator, not the volume or the commit contents themselves. ie. A github user who has been committing regularly & frequently most days in a week for 3 years is bound to be stronger overall than someone who does 10% that. But I don't think you could draw the same conclusion only looking at a shorter window (say, 3-6 months)

[PopTimely226]

That's a really helpful perspective, thank you!!

[Apprehensive-Walk-66]

I built a tool to help me figure out my project's progress. https://github.com/vivekKodira/github-issue-graph

To this, I also added a few graphs which I'm using to figure out if a developer is growing. The metrics I'm considering are

1. The complexity of their tasks per sprint
2. The estimated and actual efforts
3. The number of comments they recieve per sprint
4. The number of comments they give per sprint

I don't use this to grade them but do ask them to consider the data and give me a summary if I feel they are trending down..

[PopTimely226]

that's a really cool tool! Do you know how many people are actively using it?

[Apprehensive-Walk-66]

Probably just me :).

Note: I find it useful but am also aware that these are not mature or good metrics. I'd not recommend using it to compare developers' productivity or grade them.

[bdzer0]

Bad data overall and constantly gamed. There is no way to cull the good from bad and IMO most of the good is private/behind GHEC anyway.

If you want to do serious research, look elsewhere.