Resources

Tutorials, guides, and deep dives into data engineering and web scraping

7 tutorials • 3 guides • 1 case study • 1 comparison

Tutorial Featured Beginner

Building Your First Web Scraper with Python

A step-by-step guide to building a working web scraper from scratch using Python, Requests, and BeautifulSoup. No prior scraping experience required.

45 minutes
Guide Featured Intermediate

Why Web Scrapers Fail Silently: 7 Failure Modes Every Data Engineer Should Know

The 7 silent failure modes that break production scrapers without triggering errors — and the monitoring framework that catches them.

18 minutes Part 1 of 8 Requires: Basic web scraping experience, Understanding of CSS selectors Code
Case Study Advanced

Building ScraperGuard: Architecture Decisions and Tradeoffs

The 8 major design decisions behind ScraperGuard — library vs. service, observer vs. interceptor, rules vs. ML, dual fingerprinting, fault tolerance, and what I'd do differently.

+2
22 minutes Part 8 of 8 Requires: Software engineering experience, Familiarity with Python project structure Code
+1
Guide Advanced

From Scripts to Systems: Designing Production Scraping Infrastructure

Five architecture patterns for reliable scraping — observer vs. interceptor, snapshot baselines, failure classification, composite health scoring, and alerting.

20 minutes Part 7 of 8 Requires: Production scraping experience, Understanding of distributed systems concepts Code
+1
Tutorial Intermediate

Monitoring Playwright Scrapers with ScraperGuard

Add data quality monitoring to Playwright scrapers — async context manager, one-shot capture, multi-page workflows, and hybrid Scrapy+Playwright setups.

12 minutes Part 6 of 8 Requires: Playwright for Python experience, Async/await familiarity Code
+1
Tutorial Intermediate

Integrating ScraperGuard with Scrapy: Add Scraper Monitoring in 5 Minutes

Add production monitoring to any Scrapy spider with 2 lines of config — middleware setup, custom signals, per-spider schemas, and troubleshooting.

14 minutes Part 5 of 8 Requires: Working Scrapy project, Familiarity with Scrapy settings and pipelines Code
+1
Guide Advanced

DOM Diffing Deep Dive: How to Detect Structural Changes in Web Pages

The complete algorithm for structural change detection — HTML normalization, dual fingerprinting, recursive tree comparison, and CSS selector tracking.

25 minutes Part 4 of 8 Requires: HTML/CSS fundamentals, Python intermediate level +1 Code
+1
Tutorial Intermediate

Building Schema Validation for Scraping Pipelines: From Type Checks to Drift Detection

Build a complete data validation layer — from Pydantic schemas and batch statistics to statistical drift detection that catches subtle degradation over time.

22 minutes Part 3 of 8 Requires: Python experience, Basic web scraping knowledge +1 Code
+1
Comparison Intermediate

Scrapy vs BeautifulSoup: Choosing the Right Python Scraping Tool

A hands-on comparison of Scrapy and BeautifulSoup with real code examples, architecture diagrams, performance benchmarks, and a decision framework to pick the right tool for your project.

25 minutes
Tutorial Beginner

Understanding robots.txt: What Every Web Scraper Needs to Know

A beginner-friendly guide to robots.txt — what it is, how to read it, and how to build Python scrapers that respect website crawling rules automatically.

20 minutes
Tutorial Beginner

Respecting robots.txt in Python Web Scrapers: A Complete Guide

Learn how to build ethical web scrapers that respect robots.txt rules with Python. Includes working examples and best practices for responsible data collection.

20 minutes