Day 4 of building ScrapeForge 🛠️
Today was more grind than excitement.
I completed the remaining work on the SERP scraper and then moved on to implementing proxy rotation.
I decided to test free proxies first. I manually collected around 2000 of them and wrote a script to check which ones actually worked. After nearly two hours of testing, only 139 were usable.
This made the trade-off very obvious. Free proxies cost time and reliability. Paid proxies exist for a reason.
Lesson from today: sometimes paying is cheaper than wasting hours.
On to Day 5.
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This is a painful but valuable infra lesson. Free proxies feel “free” until you account for engineering time, reliability, and mental overhead.
From a PM perspective, this kind of choice directly impacts perceived product quality (speed, success rate, trust), especially once real users are involved.
I’m building hands-on PM experience and enjoy collaborating with builders at this stage, happy to help think through trade-offs, priorities, or user impact if useful.
Looking forward to Day 5.