The momentum has been palpable, with the developer base in the country having grown threefold from 5.8 million in 2021. “About 200,000 computer science graduates are coming out of engineering degrees, and that creates a convergence. India could be the leader, not only in software but also in AI. Children and adults alike will learn to code in their native language, leading to a prolonged groundswell of developers,” said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke.
During the Dec quarter of last year, developers in India owned more than 36.9 million repositories on GitHub, compared to 27.4 million during the year-ago period. Over 3.8 lakh developers from India made more than 9.7 million contributions to open-source last year. In comparison, in 2022, over 3.2 lakh developers from India had made more than 8.1 million contributions to open source. From reaping the benefits of AI pair programming to accelerating the next era of software development, GitHub is improving developers’ productivity.
Last year, GitHub surpassed $1 billion in annual recurring revenue. Recently, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said GitHub revenue accelerated to over 40% year-overyear, driven by the growth and adoption of GitHub’s AI developer tool Copilot. Copilot has 1.8 million paid subscribers and has been embraced by over 50,000 firms globally, including Autodesk, Dell, and Goldman Sachs. In India, GitHub counts Cognizant, Infosys, MakeMyTrip, and Paytm among its top customers. Among its recent AI features, Copilot Enterprise tailors Copilot to a company’s codebase and allows developers to converse with it in natural language. Dohmke grew up in the Berlin suburb Marzahn on the East side of the wall, before it fell. “The complexity of software systems has increased compared to the early 90s.
There wasn’t much software back then, but today you can’t imagine a world without software,” he said. When asked about how GitScore, along with GenAI, could be the ultimate litmus test in understanding developer proficiency, Dohmke said that in many interviews, instead of asking the developer to write code, interviewers ask them to use Copilot to write the same piece of code. “This shows their prompting and reasoning skills. It provides good insights into whether the developer not only understands how to work with models, but also how they’re validating the code that was written,” he said. GitScore offers a comprehensive overview of a developer’s GitHub profile statistics and code analysis results.
