Over the holidays as I desired to a) visit various and sundry family members and b) also get some coding done in my limited spare holiday time, it became clear that the intersection of these two projects required that I bring a different computer than the one I had been used to coding with. The clearly correct candidate was an old MacBook Pro that had been gathering dust after being replaced a few years ago. I had not had much experience with a Mac before, but it couldn’t be that hard to switch over for some minor coding, could it?
While a simple scrape of a small site is rather trivial in the grand scheme of things, the social aspect of scraping makes it a particularly interesting field of programming to dive deep into. In particular, bigger sites that take themselves and their data very seriously will often resist scraping attempts. In many cases this is understandable, as bad actors can be looking for destructive tools (e.g. price and inventory data to sell to a competitor), or for carefully created content to be copied en masse and re-posted for profit in another corner of the internet. Sites therefore may take steps to block a scraping effort.
One of the great puzzles in designing a readable programming language is setting the right balance between readability in compactness. On one extreme, ‘readability’ can go so far that code is too verbose to actually read (and especially write) quickly. On the other, intentionally making code compact eventually results in longer periods for both reading and writing as well, since compressed symbols become arbitrary and difficult to remember.
Why did you decide to learn Software Development?