The Wisdom Of Crowds (Of Developers)

A crowd of developers has fewer blind spots

Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
4 min readMay 4, 2024
Photo by Alex Block on Unsplash

“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” Linus’s law

I had a tricky design problem I was wrestling with recently. I had come up with several potential solutions. Mostly in software developer there is usually an obvious answer to most problems.

This was a wicked problem. There was no easy or obvious solution. Each potential solution to the problem was complex and had a significant maintenance overhead.

The other nagging concern I had was wondering if there was another solution I hadn’t considered.

What did I do?

I explained the problem to some experienced developers/architects and asked if they had tackled similar problems in the past and how would they solve it.

People who have solved the same, or a similar problem, is extremely useful. Experience reveals the unknown, unexpected lower level details of the problem and solution.

There can be complexity or 2nd level/time delayed consequences of the solution. Most problems are the high level problems, hiding underneath are other problems you will need to resolve but you never knew were there.

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Ben "The Hosk" Hosking
Ben "The Hosk" Hosking

Written by Ben "The Hosk" Hosking

Technology philosopher | Software dev → Solution architect | Avid reader | Life long learner

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