Ronin developers are nothing new. They wander from project to project, cutting clean code, setting things right, and moving on to the next town in a cloud of mystery. The cloud age has turned these once proud samurai into an amorphous blob of developers, dually catalogued, tagged, and available by the hour via crowdsourcing sites like uTest and CrowdFlower. It's been a long time coming, this comoditization of code.. But these existing sites are just the tip of the iceberg. Herds of developers now compete for the prize of completing tasks online for points, with the winner taking the money and the losers taking nothing. The TopCoder model has been reinvented in CloudSpokes, from Appirio.

It's almost like turning software development into a game. You post up your requirements online, and a few days or weeks later, a number of peer-reviewed solutions are offered and ranked. Thanks to the modern socially-aware Web, it's easier than ever to build processes around the crowdsourcing of code. At the end of the day, it's no different than outsourcing.

Does it actually work in the long run when building enterprise software? It's working quite well for many users already. But there will always be the need for the wandering samurai. These new crowdsourcing systems may just be the new way he or she finds their next job.