- Premium Content It takes our newsroom weeks - if not months - to investigate and produce stories for our premium content. You can’t find them anywhere else.
Lokesh Choudhary · · 6 min readExclusive: SEA crucial to GitHub’s growth strategy, CEO says
Terence Lee contributed to this report.
Singapore has become the fastest growing developer community in Asia-Pacific recently. The city-state saw the highest growth (39%) in developer population in the region this year, as per GitHub’s 2023 Octoverse report.
While the report claims Singapore has over 1 million developers on GitHub, it must be noted that the company defines a developer as anyone with a GitHub account and this number likely also includes non-programmers. That said, it is estimated that there are around 200,000 software developers in the city-state.
US-based GitHub, an online software development platform, is one place where this community is growing.
“We believe in the long term. We will have a significant number of open-source developers, startup developers, and obviously enterprise developers here in Singapore,” Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, tells Tech in Asia in an interview.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke / Photo credit: GitHub
Despite having a much smaller population, Singapore punches above its weight to rank 10th in the APAC region in number of developers on GitHub.
“India, on other hand, is on the path to replace the US and become the largest nation on GitHub by 2027,” says Dohmke. The country – currently in the second spot globally – has 13.2 million developers, a number that has grown 36% in 2023.
Besides Singapore, Indonesia is another Southeast Asian nation that is seeing a rise in its developer community. The archipelago surpassed Japan as the third-largest country in APAC based on the number of developers on GitHub. The platform also expects Indonesia to rise to fifth place by 2026, up from its current ninth spot.
In January, GitHub claims it recorded over 100 million developers on its platform.
The CEO of the Microsoft-owned company believes that Southeast Asia will play a crucial role in the growth of its developer community. To encourage this, the company plans to invest through its existing startup programs and industry events.
It currently has a small remote team in Singapore, though Dohmke didn’t disclose if it plans to increase its headcount in the region.
The company shifted to a remote-first approach in February after it laid off 10% of its staff worldwide.
Copilot for SEA
What about the costs?
Curbing copyrights issues
Stay ahead in Asia’s tech landscape
This is premium content. Subscribe to read the full story.
GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke sees growing demand for the firm’s AI code generator Copilot and plans to reduce latency for users.
We know this is not ideal. ⌛ Sign up in 20 seconds. Cancel anytime.
Our subscriber community includes professionals from these companies:
Stay updated on the go with our mobile app.
Get latest insights with smoother, more personalized experience through TIA mobile app.
