Who are we?
I’m Neville Ridley-Smith, corporate Java coder by day, AuctionSieve coder by night.
And my wife and our kids – Rachel, Trinity, Morgan & Xander.
What else have you done?
I have a company called Hashbang (it’s a Unix thing). I do Java EE contracting for various companies. Some places I’ve worked include Tourism Australia, Macquarie Bank, Zurich, Allianz, Transport NSW.
By night, I enjoy creating stuff that helps people, like AuctionSieve. Here are some of my other sites:
http://www.deadharddrive.com (http://www NULL.deadharddrive NULL.com)
http://www.whendidyoujointwitter.com (http://www NULL.whendidyoujointwitter NULL.com)
Where did AuctionSieve come from?
AuctionSieve had humble beginnings in 2003. I found myself spending way too much time trawling through eBay listings and began hacking together some code to speed things up.
Those initial programs were just scripts that ran once and output some web pages with condensed eBay results.
But it wasn’t enough! I wanted a UI to make it easy to create my trash word lists. (I was inspired after watching the Minority Report and envisioned an easy way to just highlight words and hit a button to kill stuff I didn’t want.) Not only that, I could see it was something I could make a bit of money via the eBay Partner Network.
So I took two months off work and finally released my first version. It didn’t even have normal eBay search capability – you could only download entire categories. But “boom”, filtering those trash words out was awesome and lightning fast!
We were off. And over the last 7 years or so, it’s grown and grown… And there’s more to come!