October 2023: How to Scrape Data from a Website with Python
Or if JavaScript's your thing, I answer a bunch of JS questions from listeners just like you!
Hey everyone,
Happy Halloween! 🎃 Whether you’re dressing up for the occasion, handing out candy to the little witches and goblins coming to your door, or just taking it easy tonight, I hope you have a great day (and a great month of October!).
In the middle of October, I travelled to Nashville, TN for the first all-company meet up since I joined the fully-remote IoT startup Blues, back in the middle of 2021.
It was an absolute blast between meeting coworkers in-person, hearing great insights firsthand from customers, recognizing folks (myself included) who exemplify Blues’ values, and building some inventive products in a day-long team hackathon (remote controlled tesla coils, anyone?).
But despite the travel, I still managed to put together some good web development content for you this month, so let’s get to it.
The LogRocket podcast I regularly co-host invited me to be a panelist answering JavaScript questions from listeners just like you.
If you’ve ever wondered what the event delegation model is good for, how to optimize performance with apps dealing with asynchronous code, or how to stay up-to-date with the fast-paced world of JavaScript in general, this episode is for you.
Well known folks in the web development space Josh Goldberg, Colby Fayock, Noel Minchow, and myself weighed in on questions like these and much more about TypeScript, prototypal inheritance, and if it’s still worth learning React in today’s market in this episode of PodRocket.
If you have some burning JavaScript questions, feel free to let me know what they are - they may just get answered in a future episode!
I also started a new blog series - and this one’s all about scraping data from websites with Python.
A few months back, a friend asked me to write a program to collect data from one of the NFT collections on the NFTrade website, get all the NFTs listed for sale, convert their prices from BNB to USD, and assemble all this in a CSV spreadsheet.
Unfortunately, the NFTrade site doesn’t have a public API I could get all of this data from, so I had to get creative and wound up writing a Python script using the Selenium Python package to help me do it.
And along the way, I learned a ton of useful new techniques about how to use Python for such a task, and I’ll be sharing a lot of them in standalone blog posts, the first of which is about using Selenium WebDriver to scrape data from a lazy loading website like NFTrade.
If you've ever needed to get data but there’s no API to access it, give my blog a read and see if Selenium Python might work for you too.
I hope you enjoyed this month’s edition of “Paige Codes.” Please share with your friends if you did.
See you again at the end of November,
- Paige
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