GitHub has released a report with statistics on the types of projects the GitHub community collaborated on from September 2016 to September 2017.

Last year, 24 million people from over 200 different countries worked together on GitHub to code better and build bigger.

From frameworks to data visualisations across more than 25 million repositories, the activity picked up more this year.

With 2018 well underway, GitHub is using contributor, visitor, and star activity to identify some trends in open source projects for the year ahead.

Cross-platform development

Some of the projects that experienced the largest growth in activity were focused on cross-platform or web development.

For example, Angular/angular-cli had 2.2 times more contributors in 2017 than in 2016.

Users contributed more, visited more often, and starred projects related to Angular/Angular, Facebook/React, and Electron/Electron.

These projects simplify the development process, shortening the time from start to deployment across desktop and mobile platforms.

Deep learning

Users have also been rallying around deep learning projects across multiple industries, artificial intelligence is solving a host of complex and interesting problems.

They helped drive that interest by upping contributions to and visits to projects like Kerasteam/Keras and Mozilla/DeepSpeech.

TensorFlow/TensorFlow had 2.2 times more visits in 2017 than in 2016, and TensowFlow/models had 5.5 times more visits.

New skills

Users' committed to developing coding skills, starring projects - many created in 2017 - related to learning to code, getting coding jobs, and coding best practices.

For example, Chalarangelo/30-seconds-ofcode and norvig/pytudes provide code examples in javascript and python respectively helped users brush up on fluency in these languages. jwasham/coding-interview-university and yangshun/techinterview-handbook provide resources for how to pass the interview process for software engineering roles. i0natan/nodebestpractices, alibaba/p3c, and thedaviddias/Front-End-Checklist provide best practices for writing code and organising projects.

Methods

GitHub looked at three different types of activity to investigate the trends.

First, it identified the top 100 projects that had at least 2,000 contributors in 2016 and experienced the largest increase in contributors in 2017.

It also identified the top 100 projects that received the largest increase in visits to the project's repo in 2017.

Finally, it identified the top 100 projects that received the most new stars in 2017.

Combining these lists, it categorised projects into broad communities and looked at the communities that were the most represented at the top of the lists.

GitHub says it was impressed with the range of creative projects that emerged.

Users scratched the itch to keep track of your favourite NBA teams from the command line while they coded, and created an Android app for journalists and activists to securely monitor their homes and offices.