I agree. Code is always trivial until you start actually writing it. Then all those little pieces that you magically glossed over in your imagination start rearing their ugly head. All of a sudden your weekend is spent trying to figure out why you can’t connect to your database only to realize that you forgot to open a firewall port somewhere.
I am just as guilty as anyone of saying “Oh man, I could write that in a weekend”. Enough experience has taught me that I am dead wrong most of the time.
It’s all about the experience and the community. Open source is interesting, but I don’t think a stackoverflow clone could beat the original.
The most important fact is that the community builds itself and the site has a vision.
Hmmm… So, you want money to host question on a messageboard and get responses? I think not.
You obviously never heard of Drupal.
Those commenters are exhibiting a very common programmer flaw. Most programmers don’t realize that getting code 90% functional is only 10% of the work.
It’s very easy to bang out a mostly functional body of code. That’s called a prototype (or maybe alpha/beta if it’s really good). And it’s nowhere near production level code.
The real work comes after things are mostly functional: robust error handling, dealing with edge conditions, documentation, and a solid and streamlined user experience. This is the area where so many programmers and projects just completely drop the ball.
I believe this is why most open source projects will always be second class citizens to their closed source counterparts in terms of user base. When there’s no money on the line, the user experience is often forgotten because the programmers are too busy having fun writing code.
So is there no plan on releasing Stack Overflow into the open source world! Shame!!! 
Kidding!
Nice post! I wonder if StackOverflow clones could become the next standard demo app for frameworks, like the ubiquitous blog app has been for some years, and the address book app was before that.
Bravo! Great post!
“Given infinite time, you lowly maggots might just begin to approximate* the consummate codeglory that is stackoverflow. muahahah.”
Jeff says lots of stuff I don’t buy (or quotes it…no .NET developer should ever ever talk about another framework being “a horrible pain in the ass to use.”) But he’s got the thing that matters most right, despite our “religious” differences: user experience is KING. It is 10x more important than whether you used .NET or PHP or RoR, whether you wrote procedural code or OOP, whether you built unit tests or didn’t, .
User experience will frequently determine the ultimate success of your work, and very few people will much care about anything else.
Agreed in principle, though your list of ‘polish’ is a bit contrived. If I wanted an open-source version of stackoverflow, I wouldn’t care about ads. I wouldn’t care about the podcast. I wouldn’t care about conferences. These things are pointless frippery even for the real site, they certainly wouldn’t need to be replicated in an open-source clone.
Fully agree.
If being a programmer was just about writing code then anybody could be a programmer. Writing code is easy. Writing code cleanly, efficiently so it’s easy to maintain, now that takes some skill.
Actually, an open source alternative to Stack Overflow has existed for years. Go check out http://www.perlmonks.org. Only difference is the tight focus on a single programming language.
Get over yourself. SO is not a complicated website to recreate. I do think development of it would take more than a weekend however; likely, 4.
Why even respond to the HN claim? Are you challenging people to try and clone SO?
Only the newbest newbies tend to think building a good/acceptable product can take a weekend…
I LOVE the twitter comment! and I agree. entertaining post
I’d say
lots_of_awesome_code == ‘success’
Great article. Love the note about Twitter. Most of us probably could implement all of twitter in a weekend. However, it wouldn’t scale to millions of users, but that’s probably not important, because I doubt any twitter clone would reach critical mass.
Also, I think that specifically because you are three programmers that have been working on it for a year, proves that a small open source team could definitely create a clone in short time. But really it doesn’t matter that there are clones out there. So long as you can convince people that your product is worth the money you are charging, it doesn’t matter that there are alternatives. Sure the alternatives, whether free or just cheaper will cut into your market share. But that’s true with any business.
Not to nitpick, but wouldn’t we rather believe that success = lots_of_awesome_code? That sure looks like an assignment…