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Zyte Developers Community Newsletter Issue 5: Empowering Developers

Discover the latest news and innovations in the Zyte Developers Community Newsletter Issue 8. Stay updated with our vibrant community.

Himanshi Bhatt

1 min read ·

Zyte Developers Community Newsletter Issue 5: Empowering Developers

Zyte Developers Community newsletter issue #5

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In this issue:

  • Web scraping for a COVID-19 vaccine
  • Scraping Reddit with Scrapy
  • Easiest way to extract data from Wikipedia
  • Dateparser - Python parser for human-readable dates
  • A sip of BeautifulSoup

Web scraping for a COVID-19 vaccine

Miguel Magalhães was having a hard time finding covid vaccine slots in France. So he built a simple Python script that checked the server for the next available slot, until it finds a vacancy.

Scraping Reddit with Scrapy

This one is a bit long but interesting read. Brendan Ferris uses Scrapy to extract multiple fields like username, title, content link, etc. from posts on old.reddit.com.

Easiest way to extract data from Wikipedia

In this article, Elliot discusses the Wikipedia module in Python which allows you to scrape data from Wikipedia in the easiest way possible.

Dateparser - Python parser for human-readable dates

Dateparser was developed to make date extraction from HTML pages easier. Initially, used by web scraping developers, it was quickly adopted by the wider community and has been used for multiple applications like command-line tools, chatbots, etc. This blog post covers everything you need to know about date parsing.

A sip of BeautifulSoup

This article is for those among us who are just starting to get acquainted to web scraping. Runjot Kaur's introduction to BeautifulSoup is very easy to understand.

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The harness matters more than the model - Podcast EP07
AI-assisted data extraction

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.

John Rooney11 min read
How to build your first Scrapy extension
Developer interest

How to build your first Scrapy extension

My Scrapy project now plays a triumphant fanfare when a crawl finishes clean and a sad trombone when it doesn't, which is also how I finally learned what Scrapy's extension points are actually for.

Ayan Pahwa11 min read
Now what exactly is loop engineering? And where do Anthropic's Fable 5 model and web scraping fit in?
Developer interest

Now what exactly is loop engineering? And where do Anthropic's Fable 5 model and web scraping fit in?

A viral clip from Claude Code's creator put a name to something a lot of us have been circling: loop engineering. Here's why web scraping may be its best-fit domain — and what that means in practice.

Ayan Pahwa12 min read
Automate deployment of your web scraper on VPS with Ubuntu 24.04 cloud-init
Developer interest

Automate deployment of your web scraper on VPS with Ubuntu 24.04 cloud-init

Your VPS is ready, but now you need to work through the same sequence you have run a dozen times before: apt update, apt install python3-pip, pip install scrapy, playwright install chromium, the Chromium dependency list that never installs cleanly on the first try, Redis, possibly Postgres, whatever else this particular project needs.

Ayan Pahwa9 min read
NotAnInterview: “I Have Superpowers Now"
Developer interest

NotAnInterview: “I Have Superpowers Now"

The problem was a project with 12,000 websites to crawl, and there’s no world where you write custom spiders for 12,000 websites, not with a human team and certainly not sustainably. So Javier built a workflow: a set of AI prompts that could analyze a website, figure out its structure, and generate a crawl configuration that a generic spider could then use.

Neha Setia Nagpal9 min read
Flatcar Linux for web scrapers: deploy immutable containers with just one config file
Developer interest

Flatcar Linux for web scrapers: deploy immutable containers with just one config file

The next time you spin up a VPS to give it a persistent home, you spend the better part of an afternoon rebuilding from memory. Here's a tool to help using Flatcar Linux

Ayan Pahwa11 min read

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