Benjamin Pollack, who works with Joel Spolsky and the StackOverflow team, responds to a Hacker News thread suggesting that SO could be copied in a week.

On the part where he’s suggesting that developers only think of sites as database schemata:

Even if I didn’t know better, I would guess that very little of what actually makes StackOverflow a continuing success has to do with the database schema—and having had a chance to read through StackOverflow’s source code, I know how little really does. There is a tremendous amount of spit and polish that goes into making a major website highly usable. A developer, asked how hard something will be to clone, simply does not think about the polish, because the polish is incidental to the implementation.

It’s the smart developers who realize that simple concepts often take a lot of work to implement well, even if they can be quickly implemented poorly. I’m glad I work with smart developers.