The state of software development in Latin America

Today, Matilda is releasing its first report on the state of software development in Latin America. We look at the region's growth, the trajectories different countries are in, and the popularity of specific programming languages, libraries, and frameworks. You can find all the data here: https://www.matildaexp.com/reports

This is a live report; we are updating the data constantly and will add more data (countries, languages, libraries, etc.) and deeper analysis as we move along. If there is anything you would like to see here, please let us know!

The region has 377,000 active engineers working on the most promising and modern web development technologies. In the last 12 months, it grew 35%, a somewhat consistent growth rate since 2021.

As we look at the most prominent countries and tech stacks, here are ten insights worth highlighting:

  1. React and Next.js are the front-end technologies with the highest annual growth in the region: React grew 60% across all reviewed countries, and Next.js even higher with 83%
  2. Java and Python are the most popular backend-only languages, both with over 100K developers.
  3. Ruby on Rails, the once popular framework, has slowed down quite a bit, but we have seen pockets of growth in the last year in Peru (20%) and Ecuador (22%)
  4. In contrast, Typescript grew nicely across the region, with a 41% year-on-year growth rate.
  5. Some interesting small but mighty programming languages and frameworks: In the last 12 months, FastAPI grew 132%, NestJS 120%, and Rust 55%. These have less than 10K developers in the region, but all are growing really fast.
  6. Argentina was the country that grew the most in terms of the number of engineers, with over 55% in the last 12 months.
  7. Brazil has the most engineers; in some stacks, the presence is formidable. As an example, Brazil has a 61% share of Latam’s Spring Boot engineers, as well as 54% of NestJS, making it the top country on both total volume and on a per capita basis for these.
  8. On the other hand, Mexico usually ranks in the top 3 positions in most programming languages regarding the number of engineers. Still, it goes down to the 10th position on average when normalized by population size.
  9. Uruguay is a small country with a high concentration of talent. For example, it ranks #10 in engineers working with HTML/CSS, JavaScript, React, and Ruby. Still, it is the number one for all of these per capita.
  10. This is an exciting fact that extends to other countries; some are small in size but mighty in the concentration of talent. Some other examples: Chile ranked 5th in total engineers with Pandas (the Python-based data analysis tool) but ranked 1st on a per capita basis. Costa Rica ranked 7th for C engineers but first on a per capita basis.

Our reports are limited to the code repositories we can see on GitHub, but there are tons more info to see and analyze, and we expect to continue to expand and improve on this first version of our report.

As you navigate our report, you will likely find many more insights to help you better understand the region. You will also find things that need to be improved. If you do, please let us know!