With 2018 underway, GitHub has been busy analysing contributor, visitor, and star activity from last year to discover which were the fastest growing software communities.

Introducing the data analysis on the GitHub blog, Thomas Elliott writes:

Last year, GitHub brought 24 million people from almost 200 countries together to code better and build bigger ... and the activity is picking up even more this year.

Explaining the methodology used to find trending projects, Elliot states:

We looked at three different types of activity. First, we identified the top 100 projects that had at least 2,000 contributors in 2016 and experienced the largest increase in contributors in 2017. We also identified the top 100 projects that received the largest increase in visits to the project's repo in 2017. Finally, we identified the top 100 projects that received the most new stars in 2017. Combining these lists, we categorized projects into broad communities and looked at the communities that were the most represented at the top of the lists. 

In case you aren't familiar with the use of stars on Github, they reflect popularity both directly as a rating and in their use to signal repos devs are interested in.

Three trends were highlighted as a result of this analysis

Hoffa reports:

• Microsoft appears to have ~1,300 employees actively pushing code to 825 top repositories on GitHub.
  
  
• Google displays ~900 employees active on GitHub, who are pushing code to ~1,100 top repositories.


• Not all projects are equal: While Googlers are contributing code to 25% more repositories than Microsoft, these repositories have collected way more stars (530,000 vs 260,000). 

The data behind this chart is openly available and reveals that the most starred project by a long margin is Tensorflow, followed by Facebook/React. 

Microsoft's VSCode repo comes third in the list and it outdoes the two above it in terms of githubers from the domain in question. Top in this respect from this list of rgw ten most starred repos is JetBrains/kotlin which has 30 contributors from JetBrains itself. 

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