Came across this handy site for tracking crypto project development: https://www.developerreport.com. However, I’m curious about the accuracy of the stats provided for Internet Computer (IC): Developer Report: Analysis of Open-Source Crypto Developers by Electric Capital
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Looks very much legit. Although I will point out that because (for better or worse) the
public IC repo is only a mirror of the GitLab repository where IC development is happening; and because we decided to keep our Git history clean, by merging all commits behind a PR into a single commit before merging to master; both the number of commits and, as a result, the number of full-time developers (which are apparently defined as having made 10+ commits in the past 30 days) are significantly underestimated.
Between people pushing tiny changes to their PRs and various automation, there are likely up to an order of magnitude more commits to the GitLab repo than to the GitHub repo.
But beyond that, it looks amazingly well covered.
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Electric capital is trustworthy to a certain degree but as you clearly stated much of the work done internally is not reflected on public repos contrary what non developers believe. One needs to be part of the community and using the product in order to be able to appreciate the work the developers do with the constant updates upgrades both on the main network and the tooling that makes it easier for anyone to deploy any dApp fast and cheap.
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Fully agreed. But another way of looking at it is that there’s a price to pay for not doing work out in the open. Sure there’s a lot of work going on within DFINITY that’s not reflected by these stats, but unless one is closely involved in the community this is how much of that work is visible to the outside world.
Regardless, it is really hard to quantify the amount of effort that goes into something. I remember some other stats that compared either the number of commits or the number of lines of code. And some network that allowed everyone to roll their own token used to have a huge JSON that listed all the tokens; they would get tens of commits and hundreds of lines of changes to that file every day; I think that something like that hardly counts as development work. But whatever you choose as a metric, it will be skewed. Sometimes quite badly.
I appreciate the time you’ve taken to clarify this matter.