NOTE: I live in Austin and am acquaintances with a few people who knew him a bit while he was here.

From what I understand, at the time of Silk Road's creation, he was not nearly technically capable of creating a site like it. He seems to have learned enough to administer and update the site, but the initial construction was done by another.

SR was just a glorified rails app, and my understanding was that it was initially pretty buggy. It's within reason that someone could pick up the knowledge they need within a few months to build such a thing, at least enough to get it rolling.

I thought it used PHP? At least the question on StackOverflow that allegedly led to his demise asked about PHP issues.

I don't actually know - what I mean is, it's a basic CRUD app without much special sauce.

It used CodeIgniter (PHP).