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by closeparen 3398 days ago
What are some software projects you admire that were created by one person without teamwork?

I'd argue our field is past the point where writing any unqualifiedly impressive project is within reach of a single person, no matter how talented.
1 comments
aianus 3398 days ago
> What are some software projects you admire that were created by one person without teamwork?

Bitcoin, Minecraft, Bittorrent, Spark, american fuzzy lop, Tarsnap, PGP, and many more.

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closeparen 3398 days ago
Bitcoin: nope [0]. Bittorrent: there's a huge ecosystems of clients written by different teams of people. Spark: do you mean Apache Spark? It has many contributors [1]. Tarsnap: is convenient plumbing wiring up S3 and the academic cryptography literature, neither of which are solo efforts. PGP: its most important manifestation is probably GnuPG, which also has several contributors [2]. Minecraft: Mojang has 47 employees [3]. I doubt Notch is the only person with code in Minecraft.

You do have a point that solo brilliant engineers can start projects that go on to have massive impact (cough Linus Torvalds), but once those projects have reach, they tend to have teams.

[0] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/graphs/contributors [1] http://spark.apache.org/committers.html [2] https://www.gnupg.org/people/index.html [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojang

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aianus 3398 days ago
They were all 'created' by one person without a team. They're now maintained and perhaps improved by teams but that's a different story.
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tracker1 3398 days ago
But initial implementations are a single person, and yes, once they have greater adoption do grow... that said, there's still a lot to be impressed by in initial release.

The most recent one that comes to mind are redux + redux dev tools. Though definitely have grown since initial implementation, it was one of the more impressive things I've seen recently. Second in my mind is git itself.

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