How we started
This is part one of a 2-part series about how Catawiki started.
“It’s always good to remember where you come from and celebrate it. To remember where you come from is part of where you’re going.”
Anthony Burgess
Our wiki origins
In 2008, two friends from the Netherlands came up with the idea of creating a website to help collectors around the world organise and exchange their special objects. René, a passionate Tintin comic strips collector, had a clear vision of how the site should work and look, while Marco, a computer scientist, had the skills to build it.
In 2008, Catawiki went live as a catalogue system, with detailed information about items, just like a wiki. That’s where the name Catawiki comes from! Thanks to WaybackMachine, we can take a quick peek into the past to see what Catawiki looked like back then.
Introducing auctions
As you can see, at that time Catawiki was far from the auction platform that we know now, since it did not even have auctions! Two years would go by before Catawiki, in November of 2011, presented its very first auction. Since then, the Catawiki we know came into existence and started taking off.
Nevertheless, it still had a long way to go. In the image below you can catch a glimpse of what the advertisement campaign looked like at this exciting moment in Catawiki’s history.
Are you curious about the very first auctioned lot on Catawiki? A comic book, of course! “Storm 1 — De diepe wereld, Hardcover, 1e Druk 1978” was the first lot sold in our Comics Auction (Dutch). With an initial bid of just €5, the price kept rising until it was sold for an impressive €85!
Behind the scenes
What was the stack that supported these first versions of Catawiki? Naturally, throughout the years we have changed quite a few things, but like the quote at the beginning of the article says, we need to know where we come from to know where we’re going. Many of our initial decisions have accompanied us throughout our journey.
Catawiki ran on Ruby on Rails, which was the most modern and powerful web development framework the world knew at that time. For our UI, we used HTML, CSS, and jQuery. Our search was powered by Solr, an enterprise search platform that used the Lucene search engine. And last but not least, we chose MySQL, “the World’s Most Popular Open Source Database”, for our database.
More than 10 years later, we are still using Ruby on Rails and MySQL, and some form of HTML, CSS, Lucene, and Linux — but integrated into a much bigger, more modern stack. And more importantly — even though it is not always easy, and it can feel like changing the tires of a car racing at full speed while you are in it — we always kept pushing for continuous change.
But more on that in our next post.
Originally posted by Vladimir Bobrov on dev.to on 5 Nov 2020, edited on 26 Oct 2022.
