Author
John Rooney
John is the Developer Engagement Manager at Zyte, working closely with the community, creating content and helping developers learn web scraping
The harness matters more than the model - Podcast EP07
"The model is the engine — but the harness is everything else." In Episode 7, we dig into why the infrastructure layer around your AI model matters more than the model itself, rank the best models available right now, and ask whether the open-weighted revolution is about to make frontier subscriptions obsolete.
Building a self-hosted browser scraping service (is it more hassle than its worth?)
If you want to understand exactly how a browser scraping service works at the infrastructure level, or you have a steady workload that you want running on hardware you already own, building one yourself teaches you things that matter. Here's how I did it
I built scraping agents for 30 days - here’s what I learned
For the last 30 days, I did one thing almost exclusively: I built scraping systems with AI agents, from the ground up, across real targets, with real deadlines. Not prototypes designed to impress in a demo, not isolated experiments running against a toy website, but production-grade pipelines that needed to ship and keep running.
Supercharging web scraping with Claude skills
Learn how Claude skills can automate HTML fetching, AI parsing, selector generation, and structured data extraction to build faster, smarter web scraping workflows.
Hybrid scraping: The architecture for the modern web
Learn how hybrid scraping combines headless browsers and lightweight HTTP clients to bypass JavaScript challenges efficiently. Reduce RAM usage, improve speed, and scale your web scraping pipelines with session reuse and TLS fingerprinting
Your business doesn’t care about scraping - it cares about data
Manual web scraping isn’t the competitive advantage it used to be. Learn why shifting to a scraping API helps engineers reclaim time, reduce maintenance, and focus on delivering reliable data.
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