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by 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

2 comments

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.
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.