Separate from the discussion of whether a hard fork because of the DAO is a good or a bad idea, the very fact, that the Ethereum community (devs, miners, exchanges, researchers, …) has come together, often setting personal opinions aside, and successfully managed a hard fork in this situation is truly remarkable. Given the time constraint, the fact that we were able to come to consensus on this matter is an outstanding accomplishment.
We are able to hard fork! Some people do take that as a given, but it is not.
Of course I have been very involved in the last weeks and these have been some of the most stressful weeks of my life. What I witnessed during this time was remarkable feedback and support from many different sides. A lot of work needed to be done, and many people came literally out of nowhere and helped in many ways.
Some wrote and tested smart contracts and scripts to verify the specification (thanks to Nick Johnson, Vitalik, Gavin, Martin Köppelmann, Lefteris, Simon Jentzsch, Colm, Jo, Patrick and others), some actively participated in the Robin Hood Group (big kudos in this direction (Lefteris, Griff, Avsa and the others yet to be named)), some implemented the HF-spec (thanks to Jeff, Peter, Gavin, Vitalik, Christian, Roman and others), some wrote consensus tests (thanks Dimitry), managed communications (thanks Griff, Colm and others), some signed transactions 24/7 (@all curators!), some did security reviews (thanks to Vlad, Gün, Brian, Vitalik, Martin K. and many others), many gave valuable general feedback (reddit and other forum participants), many adopted the change (exchanges, blockchain explorers, …), some built UIs (thanks to Taylor from myetherwallet), some kept the community informed (the daohub.org team (Felix, Auryl, …), Stephan, active redditors, many bloggers …) and many others did much much more.
I know I forgot to mention many names (or wanted to protect their anonymity ) and tasks, but the active support in terms of real work I could see has been amazing. And almost none of those people got paid for any of this. Also thanks to all the families and friends who supported all of them. Thank you all very much!
Although some do question the analogy “code is law”. I do not. We just found out that we have a supreme court, the community!
Source: https://blog.slock.it/what-an-accomplishment-3e7ddea8b91d#.rxnd1ko5d