dreadedmonkeygod . net

Benjamin Pollak has posted one of the best explanations of why seriously usable software is hard, and takes lots of time. But it's disguised as a calling-out of Hacker News for stupidly claiming that the programmer Q&A site Stack Overflow could be copied in a weekend.

First, the bullet-proof math:

StackOverflow's *.cs, *.sql, *.css, *.js, and *.aspx files come to 2.3 MB. So merely typing the source code back into the computer will take you about eighty hours if you make zero mistakes.

Then, a tour de force of why the devil is in the details: moderation, spam filters, scalability, graphical design, search, user profiles, security & internationalization.

Plus everything you haven't thought of.

This is why, when I know I'm going to be asked, "Why is this taking so long?" I mercillessly log my daily to-do items, complications, and what information I'm waiting on. Sometimes, the delay is because I'm just not seeing something that I should. But most of the time, it's because I'm working on something that has a ten-word description, but is in fact devilishly hard.