Will someone just do me a favour and clone this thing (properly, with polish, better than the Chinese clone) and just shut these guys up.
Writing code is trivial. Writing code that results in a great product is a lot more work, but still doable. Coming up with what actually makes a great product, that is the real work, the part that open-source projects often get wrong. Unfortunately, you’ve already done that work, and it’s in the public; an open-source project would not have to do the hardest part of what makes Stack Overflow awesome.
“And, they’re written in Ruby on Rails instead of ASP, so they’re much cooler too!”
The logic escapes me. Trying again…
Programmers are nothing! Designers and executives are everything! Open source can never compete with closed source!
Actually, I’m far less worried about the “I could write that in a weekend” syndrome as I am about the “YOU could write that in a weekend” syndrome (usually spoken with complete confidence by a liberal-arts sales and marketing type) It’s one thing to convince a fellow developer that something that appears simple is actually very complex. It’s quite another to convince a business executive, and unfortunately in the business world, they’re the ones most often making our lives hell.
Good points, it would take more like 2 weekends.
What makes Stackoverflow successful? Err… 129k subscribers to Jeff’s blog. That’s 5+ years of hard graft on his part. Nothing to do with code. The code made people come back to it after trying it.
Seriously though, well done Jeff and Joel - a master-stroke.
How bad can it be? (Raptors, that’s how bad) ;D
http://xkcd.com/292/
Yeah, but i think that you’re all forgetting what actually got SO off the ground in the first place. It was two people that did some podcasts and whatnot and let people in on the whole thing from the start. Those two people just happened to be rather “famous” amongst the “coding population”.
Sure SO is a polished experience but creating something like that isn’t all that hard, at least not for someone who can actually manage a project. Gathering critical mass to start things up is difficult.
Well, code might be simple to write (although not so simple if you want to make it robust, not a toy running on localhost), but indeed lot of work needed to make a clone have been done already: the hard work is to:
- Have the base idea: your application is truly original in the end, even if it is a mashup of various concepts (forums, notations, wiki, etc.);
- Come up with the detail and implement them;
So, coding is only part of the work; making good specs and design might be the harder part. And if somebody clone SO, he doesn’t have to be innovative, just scrupulous…
It is a bit like those people making clones of games like Mario: they do a good job, but the genius comes from the original idea!
So, what?
Two weekends?
Just kidding. Nice work on Stack Overflow.
A few comments:
1: Dilbert’s boss assumes that anything he doesn’t understand must be easy. This kind of boss does not have a monopoly on the assumptions.
2: One of the recognized marks of virtuoso performance is that it looks easy. Go to a world-class ballet performance, and the dancers seem to move effortlessly. Take a ballet class, and find out that much simpler performance is hard.
Therefore, to say, “SO makes it look easy” (which I would hardly challenge) is another way of saying “They have done a virtuoso treatment of user experience.”
Lastly, I’m thinking about my own website; I don’t know if I’ve managed to make it look easy, but I can say that it (http://JonathansCorner.com/) would not have nearly the same success unless I had spent a lot of time on usability and user experience touches that are rarely noticed if you do them right. And I can say from that experience that SO is easy to take for granted in a way that reflects a great many things that should not be taken for granted if you are trying to understand how hard it would be to make a good clone.
Excellent post!
-Jonathan
I don’t get a lot of the OSS sentiment. I someone creates a piece of software, its theirs, it doesn’t belong to the public yet the OSS crowd seem to try and bully people into opening it up. I support lots of OSS ideas, and hope to start my own project soon, but that doesn’t mean every popular application should be open sourced just because you think it must. It’s not yours. Why is making money and protecting your business such an evil thing in the software industry? I think it’s quite destructive.
Great post, good points.
Now… if only I could convince my boss that the length of my weekend should be the time it takes to implement a system like StackOverflow…
I still think that programmers should not be marketing people and so on. Might work in a small company, but in bigger ones a programmer should be able to concentrate on programming, not all the other stuff.
It is not sensible to say that any code is trivial or meaningless. Does a ‘hello world’ program have any significance or value? Does a first step?
Yes, some developers do have an immature lack of restraint and discipline that predisposes them to blurt out ‘… can be thrown together in a weekend’. The trouble is that the audience to this unprofessional behaviour comprises a significant proportion of incompetent managers, sales and marketing types that will take such platitudes as literal truth. The consequences of this are manifest to all.
Steve McConnell, don’t give up.
It’s just webprogramming guys not rocket science!!!
- Why would I copy a working application (this is like copying a tattoo)
- When someone looks at StackOwerflow and things he can do in one week he should really try
Why would you do a open source clone of this site? It works and it is open for all. So what’s the point. Except to capitalize on the success of someones idea.
You could build the base in two weeks but the finishing polish would take months.
Just get real and have your own ideas.
I’ve seen a car. You could build one in one weekend, you just need four wheels, a chassis, an engine and a steering wheel, and plumb that together 
Hi,
Good work and remember that lots of people in this community are pissy because they don’t have any good ideas themselves.
They crave success so much and they hate it when someone else does well.
Go get’em!