Filho, F.Perin, M.Treude, C.Marczak, S.Melo, L.da Silva, I.dos Santos, L.2017-10-192017-10-192015Journal of Internet Services and Applications, 2015; 6(1):17-1-17-121867-48281869-0238http://hdl.handle.net/2440/108755Brazil is an emerging economy with many IT initiatives from public and private sectors. To evaluate the progress of such initiatives, we study the geographical distribution of software developers in Brazil, in particular which of the Brazilian states succeed the most in attracting and nurturing them. We compare the prestige of developers with socio-economic data and find that (i) prestigious developers tend to be located in the most economically developed regions of Brazil, (ii) they are likely to follow others in the same state they are located in, (iii) they are likely to follow other prestigious developers, and (iv) they tend to follow more people. We discuss the implications of those findings for the development of the Brazilian software industry.en© 2015 Figueira Filho et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Collaborative software development; software engineering; social network analysis; BrazilJournal article003004164210.1186/s13174-015-0032-62-s2.0-84938863565231206Treude, C. [0000-0002-6919-2149]