I got tears in my eyes reading your comment.

What you've said is the equivalent of saying Odysseus would have been so much better if only he'd brought a cell phone with him, so he could call his wife and let her know when he'd be back.

I disagree with this. It's a net win to exercise. You're repaid for the couple hours a week you lose with greater productivity during the remaining hours.

This is the crucial mistake:

"How much time does a bootstrapped company take? All of it."

That's not true. What a startup (bootstrapped or not) takes is 100% of your performance, not 100% of your time. And optimizing for performance means spending some time on maintenance.

For the same reason, it's not good to live on junk food. It makes you less productive. The best food for founders is probably rice and beans. That's what we lived on during Viaweb.

A weekend? Really?

We have documented evidence in the form of podcasts that it took a team of 3 talented developers about 6 months to build StackOverflow. If you're looking for an order of magnitude estimate for how long it would take to reproduce it, that's it.

How exactly are you planning to reduce an 18 man-month project down to a single weekend of your time?

More generally, why is this attitude so common among programmers? How, in the face of documented proof to the contrary could an intelligent person like the parent still consider a site of the complexity of StackOverflow to be a "weekend job"?

I think it's more that it was launched by two really well known (by programmers) programmers. Exposure is everything.

If free is the future, why does Chris Anderson's book titled "Free" still cost $26.99? Considering the whole book is about making money by giving things away, I'm surprised he hasn't figured it out how to do this with his own book.

Also, I believe that the power of FREE is not about money. It's about avoiding the hassle of paying. It doesn't matter whether you're paying 10 dollars or 1 cent - the hassle factor is about the same in both cases. This makes a free product more than 1 cent cheaper than a 1 cent product.

People with privileged jobs are always writing crap like this. Why shouldn't people retire?

Journalists, programmers, scientists, executives...we have jobs that can be interesting and fulfilling and are not physically demanding. There's no reason to stop unless you want to.

News flash: not everyone has an interesting job that they want to keep doing until they drop dead. A lot of people work manual labor, or mind-numbing service jobs. 45 years of that and you'd be ready to retire too.

In the Western world at least, our societies are rich enough to support this. I think we should. And almost everyone agrees with me. Check the polls on raising the retirement age.

A lot of what makes Stack Overflow successful is the amount of effort they've put into making a great user experience. That's not the sort of thing you just come up with in a weekend. It's a continual process that requires a lot of attention. And let's face it, open source's strong point generally isn't in engineering good user experience.

The subject matter is interesting, but what I find most interesting is a blog performing real, 'hard-hitting' local journalism, of genuine interest to a very specific social subgroup.

I'm surprised/impressed at how quickly they're moving on this whole Stack Overflow concept. There are YC startups that don't seem to be as nimble as Atwood's team. What's the long-term relationship between Atwood and Fog Creek?

The story of Mel 2.0:

He spends 16 hour days fighting with browser incompatibilities, catching up with an ADHD-afflicted industry, answers massive amounts of emails, and does more SEO than coding.

Terrible idea, actually. The productivity gained by the health sacrifices is dubious and might be counterbalanced by the negatives.

Sacrificing most of the fun but not productive activities that fill the hours of less-ambitious young people (video games, TV, social drinking, chasing tail) is reasonable (I haven't had a drop of alcohol, or been on a date, in months). An occasional 5-hour night of sleep can be justified by a freakish, almost hypomanic productive streak. Sacrificing one's health for work is idiotic, and going 7 years without taking a vacation is nothing to be proud of.

[Edit: I developed panic disorder from working through a severe flu, in an overbearing environment. I'm still on meds, over a year later. So I have personal experience to support my claims.]

If it's just need a weekend, why not do it yourself?

PS: Don't forget to open source it.