statistics

Cyprus National Internet Portal for Open Data

It is via this Cyprus Mail article that I’ve learned that not only Cyprus has an official Open Data portal, but that it’s also the best in Europe:

Cyprus is one of the top five European Union countries in the field of Open Data for 2018, while the new National Open Data Portal data.gov.cy scored highest among 31 open data portals in Europe, a special honour and recognition for the Open University of Cyprus (OUC) that developed and implemented the National Open Data Portal in collaboration with the public administration and personnel department of the finance ministry.

So far I’ve only had a quick look around, and I have to say that it’s quite impressive! Even though most of it is in Greek, Google Chrome translation handles it nicely. Here are a couple of interesting bits to get you started:

And there is so much more … Well done, Open University of Cyprus!

PHP 7.3 Performance Benchmarks Are Looking Good Days Ahead Of Its Release

PHP 7.3 is scheduled to be released on December 6th, 2018. As always, it’ll bring a few changes and new features (read more about it here or here). But it’ll also bring a significant performance improvement. Here are the results of a few benchmarks. Long story short:

PHP 7.3 is just shy of 10% faster than PHP 7.2 in the popular PHPBench. PHP 7.3 is 31% faster than PHP 7.0 or nearly 3x the speed of PHP5.

Bring it on, I say!

What’s something very few people know about PHP?

“What’s something very few people know about PHP?” blog post (and Quora answer) provides some more impressive stats and links about the popularity of the PHP programming language.

This goes well with this recent post.

PHP is dead…Viva le PHP!

Here’s a great post on why all those “PHP is dead” blog posts and forum threads are a complete load of crap.

Here’s the reality: nearly 80% of the internet is running on PHP as of 2018.

I guess PHP isn’t that dead after all.

PHP doesn’t scale. Riiiiiight. Wikipedia runs entirely on PHP and is the fifth most visited site on the internet. There’s also this little site called Facebook that uses PHP, ever heard of it?

My favorite quote from that blog post is this one:

PHP is the Fidel Castro of programming languages; after all Castro outlived five US presidents who ordered his assignation.

That’s a nice way to put it …

GitHub : 100 million repositories

GitHub is celebrating a very important milestone – they are now hosting 100,000,00 repositories. This is truly a remarkable achievement! Congratulations!

And while many of these are private, the majority, no doubt, are the Open Source projects. GitHub is indeed a cozy home for the Open Source Software, and the world wouldn’t be the same without GitHub.

Read their blog post for some cool statistics. Here are a few numbers to get you going:

100,000,000 repositories (obviously)
31,000,000 developers
1.1 billion (enough with the zeros already) contributions
Founded in 2008 (10 years ago), raking up mere 33,000 repositories that year (who could have known?)
Nearly one third of all repositories was created during the last year (insane growth)
On average, 1.6 new repositories created every second

Knowing these numbers, and working with GitHub on a daily basis, it’s difficult to imagine how crazy are all the usual metrics (daily/monthly active users, visitors, page views, etc.).

I’m raising a pint to the next 10 years and many repositories. And really hoping their recent acquisition by Microsoft is going to help, rather than the usual.