STIBIDIK is an online marketplace that specializes in vintage fashion from the best second-hand boutiques.

I’ve been working at STIBIDIK as co-founder and CTO since 2016.

Quick summary about the tech stack:

• the initial site was built in Go with the Gin web framework and a PostgreSQL database. The frontend was built using Ampersand.js. This was hosted on Heroku, with media content (images) on Amazon S3. This also relied on Mailjet for sending e-mails to customers and to the staff.
• the next iteration was built in Python using Django and Oscar, with a PostgreSQL database (and later Elasticsearch for search and faceting) and Redis cache and session store. This was hosted on Heroku (with images on Amazon S3).
• the website was later migrated to DigitalOcean. The deployment involved Docker images built from Gitlab CI, which are then deployed to a Docker Swarm cluster using a fabric script.
• lastly, we moved to a much simpler solution using Shopify. This involved improving on an existing theme using Liquid, SASS and JavaScript.
• since the “normal” Shopify admin dashboard lacks a few features needed by the team, I wrote a Tampermonkey userscript in modern JavaScript to improve it. This involved a lot of VueJS, promises and async functions, and liberal use of several REST and GraphQL APIs.

The initial goal of STIBIDIK was to provide a “wanted” service: customers could describe a specific item they were desperately looking for, and the team would look for it over the Internet and with its offline partners (hand-picked, trustworthy boutiques). However we quickly realized this service would most likely never be profitable, so we pivoted to something else.

We then decided to build a marketplace that would connect boutiques (our partners) to online customers. To make that attractive to our partners, we built a stock management app that helps them manage their shop and sell online at the same time.