Thread by @QuinnyPig

How productive have you been lately?

We turn now to @GitHub's VP of Strategy, Research, and Ass-Kicking, Dr. @nicolefv and her report on productivity from last month.

octoverse.github.com

You can get insightful research around data.

You can get awesome graphics.

But only @nicolefv combines the two.

So big pull requests suck, humans suck at repeatable things, open source makes for a fun hobby, and devs are weird.

A bonus fifth item: anything can sound obvious and dumb when I reduce it to something absurd on Twitter.

I assume that at least 20K of those 35,000 organizations are various Microsoft business units.

These numbers likewise drop by 2/3 if you remove my horrifically broken bash script with a loop.

Rust doesn't appear on this graph of popular languages because people don't use @github to store their conference slide decks.

"What would you do if the world was ending?"

Apparently you would go write some JavaScript.

Ideally most of this was to projects that don't explicitly enrich @Elastic and basically nobody else.

Next we talk about Developer Activity. For evaluating this based upon GitHub issues and commits, we sure do spend a lot of fucking time in meetings, don't we...

Busting out a @sarah_edo quote demonstrates that @nicolefv is quite capable of ensuring that you find out, should you be so foolish as to fuck around.

This feels like a @nicolefv throwback to her earlier work wherein she compares the differences between what I recall as "high performing elite teams" and "shitty ones."

Probably the single thing I would change is explicitly calling out that "living through a global pandemic might not be the best productivity experiment" not because the report didn't control for this, but because many managers will take the wrong lesson.

Now let's talk about what this report didn't have.

* A 'give us your contact info' gateway to download it.
* A sales pitch for any one of countless @GitHub, @Azure, or @Microsoft products.
* Anything for me to really dunk on. It's *superbly* well executed.

In summation: @nicolefv is a magical treasure that remains one of the best parts of our industry, and @Github (pronounced "Jith Ubb") is supremely lucky to have her.

I will now take questions and direct them to Dr. Forsgren.