Mpire Builder is an application for people who frequently sell items on eBay. As a hosted application it has an advantage over desktop based applications like eBay's Turbo Lister in that it is able to respond to events on a seller's behalf as soon as the events occur. In other words, items that don't sell can be immediately relisted, positive feedback can be reciprocated, end of auction emails can be sent out, and so on. For people who are managing a large number of auctions, this sort of functionality is a huge time saver.

I originally signed on to work on Mpire Builder because I was interested in working on an end user application that I thought could garner a loyal userbase. I wanted to spend time puttting together the sort of user interface niceties that come together to make a great polished feel for an application. You can see some of the fruits of these labors in the continuously scrolling tables (the data is loaded in the background as the user scrolls), listing preferences system, and the consignment quick entry interface shown in the movies linked on the right side of this page.

Mpire Builder is also a tremendously complicated application. It has thousands of features, an amazingly complicated database schema, and installing an instance of Mpire Builder takes hours if not days. I attribute these difficulties to cramped deadlines and a big picture design philosophy of "everything and the kitchen sink." Nonetheless, I think it was a good experience for me to learn how to work in a less than ideal codebase with sub-par design specifications. Despite the difficulties, I was able to work with the team to get in some things that I'm genuinely proud of. While there are some aspects of Mpire Builder that need some serious rethinking, there are also some parts that customers love.