We analyse contributor coordination in Kubernetes, a large open source project comparable in scale to a major enterprise software division. Over 11 years, 25,953 contributors created 46,768 issues and 339,332 comments, providing a complete record of collaboration rarely visible in proprietary settings. We examine how contributors organise themselves across technical domains and how coordination affects development outcomes. Our results show that collaboration is highly modular, with contributors interacting 42.9 times more often within domains than across them. Issues related to multiple domains take 4.19 times longer to resolve (due to both coordination complexity and issue difficulty), and coordination within the modules depends on a small subset of contributors. These findings demonstrate how large-scale coordination dependencies can be observed and quantified in open source development, offering a transferable tool for analyzing enterprise-scale software projects.

We analyze developer activity across 10 major Ethereum repositories (totaling 129884 commits, 40550 issues) spanning 10 years to examine how events such as technical upgrades, market events, and community decisions impact development. Through statistical, survival, and network analyses, we find that technical events prompt increased activity before the event, followed by reduced commit rates afterwards, whereas market events lead to more reactive development. Core infrastructure repositories like Go-Ethereum exhibit faster issue resolution compared to developer tools, and technical events enhance core team collaboration. Our findings show how different types of events shape development dynamics, offering insights for project managers and developers in maintaining development momentum through major transitions. This work contributes to understanding the resilience of development communities and their adaptation to ecosystem changes.

Blockchain technology faces significant challenges related to sustainability, including issues with optimisation, as well as high energy and gas consumption—factors that developers may sometimes neglect. We introduce a methodology to analyse the key sustainability topics discussed by Go-Ethereum developers, using thematic analysis of their issues and comments from Github. Our approach uses the BERT model to conduct an in-depth topic analysis, enabling us to study the underlying themes and trends in developer’s conversations regarding energy use and sustainability. We assess the sustainability of the identified topics using the five dimensions outlined in the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF): economic, social, individual, environmental, and technical. Our goal is to shed light on how much attention developers pay to sustainability and energy consumption issues. The findings from this qualitative analysis aim to encourage technologists to incorporate these considerations into their future projects, in order to achieve better outcomes in terms of sustainability and reduced consumption.