The unsung heroes of the IntelliJ Community repository

Inspired by a recent post, where someone analysed the commit times of popular developers, I thought it might be interesting to see something similar for the IntelliJ Community repository. Therefore, the question for today is: Who are the unsung heroes who work on the IntelliJ Community code base?

For the following analysis, I fondled with almost 250k commits that I inspected using Wolfram Mathematica. Using git log to extract all commits (not including merge commits), I obtained only the author name, the email address and the exact date of the commit. The biggest hurdle was to assign a commit to the correct developer because as it turns out, people like to use different names and email addresses. For instance, Dmitry Jemerov, commonly known as yole, used four separate email addresses through his commits.

Additionally, I found many funny typos in the provided email addresses. While you might think that most are working for JetBrains, the truth is that we have quite some developers who seem to work for JetBrians, JebTrains or even JebRains. Some even misspelt their own names. Yes, I’m looking at you Dmirtiy :)

First, I wanted to look at the top-performer regarding the number of commits. Here is a pie-chart showing the portion of commits for the top 15 developers. I find it quite impressive that the top four developers have as many commits as the remaining 11 people in this chart.

This becomes even more impressive when we look at a similar chart for the top 200 developers. The first ten developers hold over 40% of commits of all 200 developers. To give you some numbers: For Anna, Peter and Dmitry, I counted 19.111 (8%), 15.694 (6.5%), and 13.764 (5.7%) commits respectively, while the total number of commits for these 200 devs is 238.733. And as a comparison, the 200th developer made “only” 26 (0.01%) commits in total.

However, we should not forget that all people are working hard on the IntelliJ code and that the number of commits says nothing about how complicated it was to implement a feature or fix a bug. To give credit to more of these awesome developers, we can create a word-cloud and encode their contribution in font-size and colouring. Below, are the top 400 developers arranged in a word-cloud and pressed into the (old) IntelliJ logo.

What interested me was the time the commits happened because it somewhat reflects the working-hours of the developers. For specific developers, we can collect the time of all their commits and calculate a histogram. This gives a good impression of how they have been working over the years.

It appears that a good deal of work happens between 8 am and midnight and that many of the shown developers regularly commit throughout these hours. There are some difference visible but at least in the 20 people shown, we cannot find a real night-owl, who has its peak after midnight. It would be interesting to know if developers indeed work for so many hours on a regular day, but unfortunately this cannot be concluded from this graph since it is an average of all days.

Let’s stalk the top performer, Anna, a bit more and look at her average week.

The first thing we notice is that Monday is more productive than Friday. Secondly, there is a distinct separation of, what I assume is, before and after lunch in each day and, she is working in high-performance mode during the afternoon until about 9-10pm. Her Wednesday is a bit off because the lunch break is shifted one hour into the afternoon. Other than that she has quite regular schedule: Starting not too early and warming up in the first hours, make a lunch break and burn like a SpaceX rocket through the afternoon and evening.

One conclusion we can draw from this is that if you want to grab a coffee with Anna, then Friday at 3 pm is your sweet spot. To see these patterns over such a long period is impressive. Let me remind you; this histogram averages a stretch of over 14 years because Anna’s first recorded commit was on the 15th of November in 2004.

As a final graph, let us look over the distribution of all commits regarding the timezone. You need to put on your rubber gloves on for this plot because timezones are weird. In Germany, we have daylight saving time (DST), which means that I will commit at UTC+1 during the winter and UTC+2 during the summer. Other countries don’t have this, or even worse, they had it and decided they don’t like DST any more. Additionally, since there is such a vast difference in the number of commits from particular timezones, the following plot is on a log-scale. So keep in mind that the red bars are much, much higher than the others.

Taking into account that JetBrains has offices in Prague, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, Munich, Boston and Novosibirsk, we can explain above graph to a good degree. The timezones 1-4 (although I’m not entirely sure where the 4 comes from) are most likely from the offices in Prague, Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Munich. Novosibirsk might contribute to the big spike in timezone 7 and it seems Boston, with UTC-5/4 is a bit underrepresented. Please don’t draw too many conclusions from this graph. It’s unclear,e.g. if and how many people are working remotely and are not located in one of the offices. The only thing we can conclude is that the timezones 1-4 and 7 contribute 99.6% of all commits.