Top Contributors to Qt Project in 2021

2021 was a successful year for the Qt - we managed to do important releases like Qt 6.2 and Qt Creator 6 on time and with the planned content. That is however not only because of my colleagues at The Qt Company. A lot of community members are also contributing, be it by writing diligent bug reports, contributing patches, giving technical advise, or helping out other users in forums and mailing lists. Thanks to all of you - you are an important part of what makes Qt so great!

Andy Shaw already shared the names of some important people in his Qt champions 2021 blog post. Kudos to all of those who have been selected as champions!

Anyhow, the nomination process inspired me to look a bit more into the 'hard data' we have regarding contributions. The nice thing about the Qt Project is that not only the code is open source - also the contribution process is transparent.

What I've been looking for is the number of genuine commits to one of the Qt repositories, per author. You can of course debate whether the number of commits is a particularly good metric, as there are for sure some commits that are more valuable (and took longer to get in) than others. Also, commits are often a joint work - and some people spend a lot of time reviewing other people's commits. Anyhow, counting commits by author has the advantage that it is rather easy :)

Overall Contributions

I was processing all git commits in the main branches of qt5.git submodules, as well as in qtcreator.git. Taking out commits done by bots, I counted 16,573 genuine patches that landed in 2021, of which 2,234 had an author e-mail address outside of The Qt Company. That means that roughly 15% of all commits were done by external contributors!

The 2,234 commits were created by 235 individual e-mail addresses. Even taking into account that some people change e-mail addresses over the year, this is very impressive!

Top External Contributors

So, without further ado, here is the top ten contributors to git repostories in 2021 who are not employees of The Qt Company, by number of patches:

People who have been in the Qt ecosystem for a while probably acknowledge quite some names here :) Some are true legends ... Kudos to all of you, your contributions are really exceptional! We'll send you a little gift to your e-mail address, soon.

New Contributors

Alright, there's long-term experts outside of the Qt Company who have been working with and on Qt since years. But are there also *new* contributors to it? Turns out there are - actually 91 of them! You will also get a small gift to your e-mail address, too. I actually hope you continue uploading patches - let's improve Qt together also in 2022!

Want to Become a Contributor?

There's heaps of ways you can contribute! For contributing fixes to the Qt codebase, you need to follow the Qt Contribution Guidelines. The initial steps to set up things might look a tad complicated, but don't despair - we are around to help you in case of problems, be it on the mailing list, in the forum, or in other online communities.