Even if your tech skills never make a dime, they can often make your life easier
Finding a flat in Barcelona is hard!
Once my co-founder André and I could pay ourselves €500/mo from Happy Scribe we decided to move together, and we realized that finding a flat was an optimizable problem:
- hundreds of flats in different platforms, you want to filter by your preferences
- being the first to call
- wrong ux — flat-searching webs make you click around to get all the info you need. We wanted to see a big table with all the info at the same time: images, price, description, location, m^2… and scan dozens of flats in minutes.
So we built a small scraper with adapters to different flat listings like fotocasa.com , idealista.com … that would scrap every 5m for new flats and put them in a DB. Then with a small ruby app we were getting notifications on our phones right when a new interesting flat appeared and could make the call to the owner with 1 click.
It took us 1 week to find the flat 🙌
Do you have any suggestions as far how to get started with web scraping and also which languages its easiest to learn this skill with? I'm currently learning Javascript and have enrolled in a bootcamp so the journey is just beginning, but I'm curious about how to go about getting data because I can see lots of uses for it once you have it. The hard part, though, is scraping it, storing it, and then presenting it in an interesting way.
Hey @indietoinfinity,
I’m not an expert on scraping but I have seen it done very easily on:
I guess on js is as well a good option.
When it comes to storing and presenting it really depends on your use case :)