Devs, How Did You Do It?

I'm curious how you guys went about creating this fine site, and I've had a few questions floating around my head for some time:

- Did you code the site from the ground up, or did you start with some sort of framework like CodeIgniter or CakePHP?
- What kind of methodologies do you employ? MVC/OOP?
- What DBMS are you using, and have you set it up with some funky advanced options such as mirroring or memcached?
- Are you running this behemoth on a single, monstrous box, a collection of discrete servers, or one or more VPS containers?
- If you had to do it all over again is there anything you'd do differently? A different, language/platform/database/etc?

Inquiring minds need to know! :3

One day, I'd like to learn what all that is.
Write now, it looks like.

aweiufanwgiuoawbengiuernfoierfaerugnaieurgnaoeirugnaoeiugnaoeirugnaeriougnaigdflgkajdfnglkjadnglkjdfngkljadn smiley face here awegnerguaienoiuaerngauiengoaiuergnaoieurgnaoieurgnaeriougnaeoriug

But, I know it means something, I just know it.
I'd like to make a site :(