GitHubNet: Understanding the Characteristics of GitHub Network
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13052/jwe1540-9589.19561Keywords:
GitHub, social coding, social network analysis, link analysis, graph databaseAbstract
Web 2.0 technologies have not only raised microblogs, but also social software development and collaboration platforms. GitHub is the most popular software development platform that provides social collaboration. Within the scope of this study, a novel graph-based analysis model is proposed which targets to reveal (1) the characteristics of the GitHub in order to shed light on social software development in general, and (2) the most popular programming languages, repositories, and developers in order to shed light on the trending software development technologies. To this end, a subset of the GitHub network, which contains 84, 737 developers and 209, 100 repositories, was collected through the GitHub API and stored on a graph database namely neo4j to be later analyzed. The result of the analysis shows that (1) the connections in GitHub are not mutually linked, (2) JavaScript, Python, and Java are currently the most popular three programming languages, (3) You-Dont-Know-JS, oh-my-zsh, and public-apis are the most popular three repositories, and (4) TarrySingh (Tarry Singh), indrajithban-dara (Indrajith Bandara), and rootsongjc (Jimmy Song) are the most popular three developers. Furthermore, the proposed novel analysis model can be easily applied to other social networks.
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