This is (nearly) all the code that powered FirstBargain.com until it was closed down.

FirstBargain was a penny-auction startup founded by students at Cornell University, Taichi Kasahara and Jing Hui Wang. The Ruby and JavaScript code you see here was written primarily by Caleb Perkins, also a Cornell student. The frontend design, including images, HTML, and CSS, were written by Jing.

Server requirements

• Redis
• Beanstalkd
• Ruby 1.9.2 or better
• Rails 3 (3.1 or later not supported yet)
• Rack based server

Getting started

Make sure Redis and Beanstalkd are running. Run bundle followed by rake db:schema:load. Start up some workers via lib/heartbeat start and lib/stalker_worker start.

Caveats

This code scaled well in production but there should be more test coverage.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. See the LICENSE for more information.