Bid for Wine is up and running

Published by Martin Kleppmann on 01 Nov 2008.

Bid for Wine, the website which has been in development by my company for the last 6 months, finally launched yesterday. It’s very exciting – Lionel and the team had arranged listings with a number of sellers beforehand, and we gave those sellers special advance access to the site so that they could prepare their auction listings and upload photos. That meant that the moment we opened the doors to the public, the virtual shelves were already full with wonderful wines and people could immediately have a mouth-watering browse around the listings. And even though it’s another a week until the first auctions close, we have already received a number of bids, and a good number of people have signed up.

I like numbers, so here are a few vital statistics:

• 26270 lines of lovingly hand-crafted code
• 2100 hours of work
• 1219 svn commits
• 589 successful automated builds
• 491 closed bugs
• 4 developers
• 2 bugs found in the Ruby interpreter
• 1 awesome piece of software :-)

We don’t currently seem to have a page which gives due credit to all the people who made it happen, so at the very least I should give a few names here:

• The team at Bid for Wine – Lionel Nierop, Spenser Hilliard, Keith Prothero
• Ept Computing developers – Patrick Dietrich, Conrad Irwin, Michael Arnold, Martin Kleppmann
• Design & User Experience – Ella Romanos, Martin Darby, Martin Carlson

Thank you to everyone for good and hard work, and I think it’s great to see the results of our efforts online and being used.

Talking Drinks had an article on Bid for Wine yesterday, and users are discussing it in the Wine Pages forum. The next issue of Decanter magazine, the biggest UK wine magazine, will appear this week with an article on Bid for Wine – I’ll be watching the server logs, but having done some thorough load testing, I’m confident that we can withstand the wine community’s equivalent of a slashdotting. :-)