>>>>when he overheard one of them say “well even I could do this”. <<<<
I guess I'm not the only one to make the "shitz easy" blunder (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=678501 which really kicked up a shitstorm on the net =P ) and this disease doesn't seem to be limited to just programmers.
I guess it all depends on your definitions of weekend.
Getting a proof-of-concept done in a weekend is not unheard of, getting a scalable ready for mass consumption service production ready invariably takes a lot longer.
I once had some email conversation with a 'net guru' on this topic and his take on it was increase the metric and add a zero.
So, 2 days becomes 20 weeks... I'm sorry to say that that formula looks to confirm my experience to date :)
Since many think I'm being disrespectful towards the hardwork of others, i've abandoned cloning SO and decided to write something else for fun.
As for what I did over the weekend. I didn't get as much done as i expected but the project itself is coming along, as I have a working first prototype, i will put it up somewhere and then post about it.
The problem I have with the author's thesis is I think he puts too much faith into knee-jerk impulses. For example, he says this...
"I have realized that ideas which remain unexecuted for long periods of time, will most definetly never be executed.... The execution of an important idea is almost immidiately initiated. "
The truth is there are a lot of things that can stand in the way of the immedicate execution of an impoortant idea. That doesn't mean they should be given up on.
Every good idea I've had required work to execute and there have been times in my life where my job, personal life, or other circumstances didn't allow me the time to put that work in. But I didn't give up on the idea because of that and when the time came when I could execute on them I did.
Ideas should be judged on their merit not on the time frame they occured to a person.
I just said that to a software vendor yesterday.
He responded, "I'm sure you could. It took us 5 years. How long will it take you?"