Posts Tagged ‘bilibid’

The Cebu Experience

Posted by Mikko at 28 November 2011

Category: BiliBid, Travel

Tags: ,

I first stepped on Visayas’ soil last October 11, 2011 when the kids of BossChief Inc went to Cebu to promote our very own penny auction site, BiliBid. We ‘launched’ BiliBid in Cebu last October 13 at Handuraw Pizza located at Gorordo Avenue in Cebu City. Around 20 bloggers came up. Dinner was served, then the ‘program’ followed. It was a simple program. After dinner, we introduced BossChief Inc, the people behind it and BiliBid. The mechanics of BiliBid were explained, followed by a live bidding demo then the Q&A portion.

We spent most of our stay in Cebu inside our hotel room at Alba Uno Residencia, just behind IT Park. Our usual waking time was 1pm, which made it difficult for us to roam around the city since we had to fix ourselves before we can go out. Aside from our stay in the hotel, we were able to:

  • hangout at IT Park (walking distance from the hotel),
  • eat for dinner at The Ranch in Banilad,
  • eat for lunch at Matias BBQ in A.S. Fortuna,
  • ride the zipline at Papa Kit’s in Liluan,
  • have our massage at Thai Boran near Crowne Regency Hotel just before leaving Cebu.

We weren’t able to explore Cebu much due to time constraints, but never did I know I’ll be coming back to Cebu after a month.

Last week, a BossChief and I came back to Cebu to meet some friends and talk about our upcoming business in Cebu. Tonight will be my last night in Cebu and tomorrow morning, I’ll be going back to Manila. Just like last time, we still checked in at Alba Uno Residencia.

This time, I was able to enter a mall in Cebu to attend the Visayas Blogging Summit. We had our ‘business meeting’ on a Sunday at Cebu Yacht Club. After our meeting, we went to Portofino Beach Resort beach resort, at last natikman ko na rin ang dagat ng Cebu. I was unprepared for our impromptu visit at the beach – but that did not stop me from dipping on the beach.

I’m looking forward to my next visit in Cebu. Sana tuloy-tuloy na once a month ako makakabalik ng Cebu.

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Trying to solve an upcoming problem

Posted by Mikko at 23 September 2011

Category: BiliBid, Programming

Tags:

Since BiliBid started, I’ve encountered and foreseen problems that may affect the experience of the bidders. I’ve done preventive measures to counter the problems I’ve identified.

As BiliBid continues to grow, I foresee new problems that may arise. Most of them are due to concurrency (users accessing the same resource at the same moment). I have to tweak and optimize my code and queries from time to time to make it as efficient as possible, while maintaining correctness.

Testing the changes is even harder. It’s hard to replicate a potential problem, since first and foremost it does not entail a single request only. It’s a combination of continuous requests (for the timer, messages, and bid history) and user-triggered requests (placing a bid) from multiple clients. At times, there’s no assurance that the changes I’ve made will prevent those problems from happening. What I do is just convince myself that the changes I’ve made were for the better. Once convinced, I deploy it to the production server and hope for the best.

Maintaining BiliBid is not as easy as it may seem. It requires attention especially during the first bidding night after changes were committed. I have to trust on my gut feeling to decide whether to rollback the changes or not.

On the lighter note, I see this strenuous task of maintaining BiliBid as a learning experience. I learned a lot from BiliBid alone. For the love of BiliBid, I’ve read a lot of articles on server hardening, tweaking database and web servers and other related stuff.

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Three weeks of BiliBid

Posted by Mikko at 16 September 2011

Category: BiliBid

Tags:

It’s been a rough ride for the BossChiefs (incorporators of BossChief Inc) for the last two months. It was early July when we thought of creating BiliBid. We first planned to open BiliBid to the public on July 25. Then we thought of moving it on August 6, until it was finally pushed to August 22.

It was a rough ride before we actually opened. Programming BiliBid was a breeze (lucky for us we had a good programmer, yours truly), but designing it took a lot of time. It took me five (5) designs before I was finally satisfied by my work. It took us countless debates on the designs, until they gave up since I always fought for what I wanted – and since I was the one doing it, it was always my call. Continue reading “Three weeks of BiliBid” »

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