This is the working journal of someone who builds web scrapers for a living. The goal: every post is something I’d want to read myself when I’m three hours into a project, stuck, and need an answer that actually works.

What you’ll find here

• Case studies from real projects. When I build a scraper for a client or for the Apify Store, I write up the gnarly parts: anti-bot strategies that worked, the ones that didn’t, and the actual numbers (rps, cost-per-record, error rates).
• Code-first tutorials. Every guide ships with a runnable Python or TypeScript snippet. If you can copy-paste it and have it work in two minutes, the post did its job.
• Apify actor breakdowns. I publish on the Apify Store under @knotless_cadence — 31 published actors and counting (78 total in portfolio). I’ll dissect what makes a popular actor (Trustpilot scraper crossed 940+ runs without paid promotion).
• Honest tradeoffs. Proxies, headless browsers, LLMs as a parser — every choice has a cost. I’ll show the math.

What you won’t find here

• Generic “Top 10 web scraping libraries” listicles.
• Tutorials that don’t actually run.
• Tools I haven’t personally shipped or paid for.

What’s coming next

Three posts queued up:

1. Building a Trustpilot scraper that survives 30 days of production — the Apify actor, anti-bot patterns, and pay-per-result economics.
2. When LLMs are cheaper than parsers — a real benchmark on document extraction, with cost numbers per 1,000 pages.
3. Proxy rotation patterns I actually use — datacenter vs residential vs mobile, picked by use case.

If there’s a specific scraping problem you’d like me to write up — or if you need a custom scraper built — email me at spinov001@gmail.com. Pilot rate is $100 for one article or $150 for a three-article series.

— Aleksei