nadabid

The name is the product spec. Nada bid: a search over eBay restricted to items nobody has bid on yet.

The constraint was the idea. Building a better search over everything meant competing with eBay itself. Searching only the slice where a buyer still had an advantage — no bidding war, no momentum, the seller's reserve untested — was a small problem with an obvious customer.

The tagline under the wordmark says it plainly: Find the items that others have missed.

Built twice

2007, in PHP and JavaScript. Everything happened in the page with nothing waiting on a full reload, which was the whole reason I had started a consultancy around browser software that year. Auction data suits that treatment, because what you are looking at changes while you are looking at it. Results came back with price, shipping, and time remaining, and the time column ticked.

I pulled the DOM work out into matrixtable, a small library for building an HTML table you can address as an N×M matrix. I wrote it for several single-page applications, back when we just called it ajax.

2016, on Node. I rebuilt it nine years later on Express, socket.io and EJS — a full rewrite rather than a port. I spent that September on the search bar and the mobile layout, which tells you what had changed in the intervening decade. It had to work on a phone.

Where it went

nadabid.com no longer resolves. The 2016 rebuild is the version on GitHub.

It is the only thing I have built twice, a decade apart, on entirely different stacks. I would like to say that means the idea was good. DialASermon suggests I just have trouble letting things go.