Top South African developers on Github

The most active programmers on GitHub by public code commits in South Africa have thousands of contributions between them according to a ranking generated by Gayan Kuruppu, a PhD PGR in Artificial Intelligence at the University of Derby in the UK.

Kuruppu’s project, “Top GitHub users by country”, contains users from 138 countries and 674 cities, with 971 developers in South Africa.

For a user from South Africa to be ranked, they must have at least 15 followers.

Many of the users from South Africa listed use their GitHub profiles as a short CV or resume, showcasing their achievements and activity on the platform as one might in a portfolio.

The CEO of GitHub, Thomas Dohmke, recently told MyBroadband that this was increasingly becoming common practice on the platform.

“We believe that open source is, for many developers, an on-ramp to becoming a professional software developer,” Dohmke said.

“For many open source developers or early-career developers, the contribution graph on their GitHub profile is more important than their LinkedIn profile or their CV.”

Dohmke said this was because GitHub profiles offer developers a platform to showcase their skills and contributions to the open-source community.

It helps demonstrate experience in open-source collaboration, which reflects a developer’s ability to participate in a team environment — something Dohmke said was highly valued in today’s software development landscape.

For example, developers on GitHub can highlight skills like code reviews, coding standards, writing test cases, passing CI/CD, and engaging with other developers.

“If you are applying for a job and you can show that you already have engaged in the open source community and you get pull requests not only submitted but also merged, it shows the employer that you know how software development works,” said Dohmke.

“In many ways, companies operate like an open source project these days — so you can show in a real-life scenario that you could become a good team player in the company.”

MyBroadband also asked Dohmke about the trends they have spotted in South Africa’s developer community.

He said the number of software developers based in South Africa working on AI-based open source projects has boomed in the past year.

Additionally, the coding platform’s latest “Octoverse” report showed that South Africa had one of Africa’s fastest-growing GitHub developer communities.

“Nigeria, Egypt, South Africa, and Kenya are considered Africa’s ‘big four’ countries focusing on technical literacy, drawing global investors, and securing most of Africa’s startup funding in 2023,” GitHub said.

GitHub reported that over 664,000 developers from South Africa joined the platform in the past year, representing a 23% year-over-year growth.

Dohmke said the growth of AI projects on GitHub in South Africa was nearly double that percentage, at around 45% year over year.

The following table summarises the top ten most active developers on GitHub by their public contributions. A full list is available in Kuruppu’s project on GitHub.