Spolsky is a 10x blogger. Neither he nor any of his employees were ever 10x programmers. There was nothing algorithmically clever about FogBugz or CityDesk or whatever.
Did you miss how they cross-compiled Vbscript to PHP? I'd say for a lot of programmers this would have been quite the challenge, algorithmically speaking. And I would classify it as clever. With both the positive and negative connotations of the word.
