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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Early progress posts like this are helpful to follow. It’s interesting seeing how things evolve once you’re actually building instead of planning.
Curious what you’ve learned so far that you didn’t expect going in.
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.
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