In the beginning

I was sat at my desk in Holland, dealing with the usual torrent of work involved in keeping a department running in a large corporate environment. Outside, the sky was the usual gray of late November and I was looking forwards to the orderly traffic jam back home. Pretty much an ordinary day in a job I'd been doing for over 8 years. On an impulse a colleague told me about a friend in Qatar who was working for a company called Qatcom which was looking out for a CTO. I decided to take a look and before I knew it, here was on a plane for a week long interview. I passed the audition and moved out to Doha at the end of January. My wife works for a rather large software company (actually, the largest) and will join me in April once I'm settled in and she's completed some commitments. At the moment my life revolves around work, running and sleeping, with the odd near death experience on the road.

The mission statement given to me when I started was simple, "build Qatar an online auction, make sure everyone knows about it and make it the best auction site in the world". Not a bad challenge, I thougt. So, a month into the challenge where am I. I've selected my hosting solution. I'll be using linux servers running on the Amazon cloud (yep, they do more than just sells books). Using cloud computing instead of a traditional hosting company is something I've wanted to do for a long time. It will allow me to expand on demand, makes backups a breeze and fits the budget. I've also completed the requirements analysis and kicked off development of the software. I'm keeping things simple. We'll start off offering simple auctions, with the buy it now option and add more functionality as we move forwards. We'll also be offering store fronts to allow retailers, startups and anyone who feels they want to open a store online the chance to get involved. One of the most important challenges was security. We want to ensure that qbay.com is a safe place to trade, so we came up with the idea of making everyone register with a mobile phone sms confirmation mechanism. This will allow us to track down anyone breaking the rules, right to their homes if required.

So, with the initial frenzy over and development underway, I also wanted to document the process and allow people to provide feedback, hints, abuse (if I mess up), so I created this blog. I firmly believe that the best people to drive change and improvement are the users, so please use this blog as an opportunity to interact with me and get your ideas heard.

I look forwards to getting this show on the road and with the help of community feedback giving the guys at ebay a run for their money.

I bet your wondering when it will be live. Well, I don't know quite yet. I first need to get the system in my test envrionment and see how it shapes up. For now, please go along to www.qbay.com and register for the email shots and listing discounts and take a look at some of the crazy auction stories I've pulled together. As soon as I have a firm go live date, I'll be the first to shout it from the rooftops.