4+ day, 19+ hour ago   (653+ words) You build a quick scraper to watch competitor prices. It works for a week. Then a retailer changes its HTML, another starts showing member-only discounts, and your dashboard confidently says a $49 product is now $0. Bad pricing data is worse than…...

5+ day, 19+ hour ago   (542+ words) You get asked to build a feature that “matches competitor prices.” It sounds simple until the first dataset arrives. One competitor includes shipping, another shows a coupon only after login, one page says “from $19.99,” and your scraper quietly captured the…...

2+ week, 13+ hour ago   (372+ words) If you're an indie dev, you've probably heard some version of this advice: "don't guess what to build — look at real demand data." I build a product called Idea Miner that's built entirely on that premise: it mines real, budget-backed…...

2+ week, 5+ day ago   (541+ words) Disclosure: I'm the founder of Popgot, which I use as the example below. The problem and the approach apply regardless of what you build on. Every price comparison project I've seen starts the same way: scrape a bunch of retailers,…...

3+ week, 4+ day ago   (1150+ words) Every major applicant tracking system publishes its job board as a public JSON endpoint. That part is already well documented, and I'm not going to rewrite it. What isn't documented is what happens once you actually try to read all…...

4+ week, 1+ day ago   (860+ words) A bug doesn't always need hundreds of lines of code to cause a real production problem. Sometimes, one assumption is enough. In this case, the assumption was simple: "Every tag is a String." That assumption lived inside a Ruby filtering…...