I Thought Scrap and Scrape Were The Same Thing
English is not my primary language. I mostly use English to interact with my international game friends. We have never once used the word "scrape", and thus the word feels foreign for me.
When my friend first offered me this job, I thought I would be collecting scraps from social medias. But actually, the job was about creating a bot that can inspect the websites of those social medias and collect necessary informations from them.
Well, Not Much Different Than I Thought
Instagram Here We Go!
I got a job to make a scraper for Instagram. I went back and forth from inspecting Instagram website to writing the scraper.
It was a pleasant experience. Even though scraping was far away from what I was doing, my web developing experience helped me a lot. It was no different than what I had been doing with JavaScript whenever React was not involved. Well, the only difference was, I did it on my own web project (or MDN to test things out) But on this job, I had to do it on Instagram or someone else's website.
It felt like peeking on someone's house and noting whatever they have. Well, for this case the data was visible to anyone, so it wasn't a big deal.
In the end, they will use it to get insights about some social media accounts they handle. Or at least that's what I was told.
I Felt Like I Wasn't Working
I completed the scraper 2 days after working on it. And after that, I spent the rest of my 5-days trial to test that thing out.
Instead of scraping the designated accounts, I tested it on accounts that post cats, birds, or panoramic photographs. Because those accounts are popular and have lots of comments (including spam comments), the scraper took a good amount of time to unroll every comments. I took the time to enjoy the post that appeared on my screen.
A well spent time I say.
Tags
Developer's Life/
Scraping