As of October 2025, GitHub hosts over 180 million accounts and 1 billion contributions to public repositories. These repositories contain everything from code that does nothing, to code that landed Neil Armstrong on the moon. Despite their differences, all of the code shares a common goal: to instruct a computer to perform a specific set of actions using a language it can understand. Rarely, though, do open source contributors intend for the computer to be their sole audience; they also write for others to understand and build upon their work. It can then be said that these contributors, all 180 million of them, are nonfiction authors.

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