From Curiosity to Innovative Solutions: My Journey Building a Web Scraping Tool
It started with excitement and happiness, when we are happy, and blissful inside, we are actually like a innovative creator.
I remember sitting in front of window, endlessly thinking about how to create solution for farmers, what I can do for them, I am in data science background, learning data science, but suddenly a thought clicked me, "how can farmers actually make money and improve their lifestyle, then a solution suddenly appeared, which is innovation.I though youtube can be a great medium for them to show and build the potential, and it can turn them into digital services, it will convert into money.
First I have decided to create Amazon scrapper with using beautifulsoup, which is scrapping html content, where it can be used for farming equipment analysis.
I have started, and then made up my mind no matter what, I will build this.
I came up with few challenges, to extract exact element from parent...
Finally it build.
Next I level up my challenges, I thought that to create youtube scraper.
Actually I have started with selenium, because youtube is dynamic, and won't be handled properly in soup, so I used select, but lot of challenges came, I endlessly got stale elements error, and also it was not scrapping which exactly I want.
After few days of working, it has built, but I usually not satisfied, because it took much time and sometimes give error.
Next I was trying to deploy it through cloud server, it really fascinating me.The browser is not installed properly.
Then I decided to shift from selenium to playwright, and you know it works faster and cleaner, and simpler.
I got few issues to install chromium, but I came up with solutions using docker, it turned into magic deployment.
Now it's working fast and clean and deployed with no error.
Here is my demo video how it works
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## The Spark
My background isn’t in farming, or even in hardcore software engineering. I come from data science, Data always take me to find —hidden patterns, small details that the way numbers quietly tell stories if you listen closely enough.
One day, while wrestling with messy online data, I realized: *What if I could build something that collects information for me—faster, cleaner, which actually help me and and lots of people to do the analysis job.
And that’s how the idea of my web scraping tool was born.
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## The Journey of Building
Of course, the idea was exciting. The reality? Much less glamorous.
I fought with broken scripts, stale element errors, and HTML structures that seemed to change just to test my patience. Debugging felt like untangling a ball of yarn at midday—just when you think you’ve solved the knot, another one appears.
There were days when I doubted myself. Could I really do this? But I kept going. Every small win—capturing a title, extracting a link, cleaning up messy text—felt like a little victory. Slowly, my tool began to breathe.
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## The Demo Moment
The first time I saw it working end-to-end was magical.
I hit run. The tool scrolled, clicked, captured, and returned the data neatly, almost like it was saying: *Relax, I’ve got this.*
In the demo (the video I recorded), you can see it in action—fetching details, organizing them, and doing in seconds what would’ve taken me hours. That was the turning point. My frustration had transformed into creation.
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## What I Learned
Looking back, this journey taught me more than just coding tricks.
* **Persistence beats perfection.** Every broken attempt was still a step forward.
* **Curiosity is a compass.** I didn’t need to be an expert; I just needed to keep asking questions.
* **Small tools make big impact.** Even a simple scraper can save hours of human effort.
Most importantly, I learned that building isn’t about where you start—it’s about refusing to stop.
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## Closing Thought
This tool is just the beginning. What excites me isn’t only that it works, but that it opened a door. A door to building more, exploring more, and maybe even helping others solve their own data struggles.
If there’s one thing I’d share with anyone reading this: **don’t wait until you feel “ready.” Start where you are, with what you know, and let the journey teach you the rest.**
Because sometimes, the most powerful tools are born not from expertise, but from a simple, stubborn refusal to keep doing the same boring task by hand.
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✨ That’s my journey so far. And this little web scraping tool? Just the first chapter.
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