On a typical day, the largest portion of developers (37%) spend only 2-4 hours programming, according to a Tuesday report from ActiveState. Of the 1,400 developers and IT professionals surveyed, 14% said they spend one hour per day programming, 31% spend 5-7 hours, and 19% spend 8+ hours doing coding work daily.

When starting new software projects, 26% of developers surveyed said they start a new project quarterly, the report found. Another 23% start new projects monthly, while 17% said rarely. Fewer in the field said they begin a new software project twice a year (14%), weekly (12%), annually (7%), or daily (1%), according to the report.

Developers face several challenges when it comes to working on programming projects, the report found. The largest issue for these professionals is stability, or building new releases that behave the same as old releases, with 27% of those surveyed ranking this as the problem that causes the most trouble for them. Security (23%), getting approval to use specific open source packages (14%), threats in packages and modules (11%), and license issues in packages and modules (10%) were also ranked highly.

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Here are the 10 most popular platforms developers use to program projects, according to the report:

  1. Linux (80%)
  2. Windows (77%)
  3. macOS (50%)
  4. Raspberry Pi (39%)
  5. Docker Container (37%)
  6. AWS (35%)
  7. Arduino (28%)
  8. iOS (24%)
  9. Microsoft Azure (23%)
  10. Google Cloud Platform (22%)

When it comes to actually deploying projects, developers and IT professionals are most likely to use Linux (81%) or Windows (72%), followed by Amazon Web Services (AWS) (37%), macOS (35%), and Docker containers (35%), the report found.

The big takeaways for tech leaders:

  • 37% of developers spend only 2-4 hours programming each day. — ActiveState, 2018
  • The most popular platforms developers use to program projects are Linux, Windows, and macOS. — ActiveState, 2018