Client wanted to have a platform where he could manage the auctions and a flow for real-time bidding. We started developing the platform back in 2016 together and to this day working on its maintenance and extending awesome features to the portal.
I, being the sole developer was responsible for handling both the front-end and the back-end of the application. Its designed in C#.NET, ASP.NET Web API, Angular 4, SignalR, Localization, Entity Framework, Azure functions, and is hosted on Azure. Its designed to work in 2 languages i.e English and Hebrew and have the support for other languages as well.
During development, I encountered many complex challenges and one such being was the real timers irrespective of user’s system clock. The portal is designed to work in the same manner even if user updates the time on his system. It was really important for us to have this behavior because the auctions end in real time according to our timezone’s and changing time on local machine could really open up the auction again to gain an unfair advantage. I fixed it using the server’s time in real time and it wasn’t affordable for us to keep pinging our servers every second for every auction and for every user. We again solved this issue by creating a clone time based on server time and refresh it once every minute.
Another one of such challenges were the optimization and scalability of the platform. Initially, the platform didn’t worked correctly on mobile devices even though it was designed keeping in mind the responsive principles. To overcome this issue, we developed a separate site for mobile that loads on the same URLs immensely improving the efficiency and load timings for mobile users. The project has been a great success and is probably the highest rated and used platform in the country when it comes to the auction of cars.