Anthony Sidashin

As a web developer and CTO with over 15 years of experience, I am passionate about building profitable small SaaS products and pursuing Go-to-Market strategy for them. My areas of expertise include high performance, networking technology and APIs, SRE, automation using Puppeteer.js, web scraping, and SQL databases.

Time to move on: n8n vs code for SaaS builders

n8n is a no-code (low-code) automation platform - similar to Zapier but more technical - and it can be self-hosted. I love n8n (read my older detailed writeup about it): it makes you feel powerful on day one — drag a few nodes, connect an API, and suddenly you’ve automated a whole process. I've built a lot with it myself, including custom nodes, e.g. ScrapeNinja web scraping API integration node. I also maintain the Awesome n8n GitHub repo. For many non-technical indie builders and small teams,

AI Sandboxes: Daytona vs microsandbox

Why AI Products Need Sandboxing Sandboxing has become a core feature of modern AI-powered development tools. As AI coding assistants and autonomous agents become more sophisticated, they generate and execute code that needs to run safely in isolated environments. In my recent Lovable.dev and Bolt.new blog post I described two different approaches to this task. Lovable.dev uses Fly.io containers with Firecracker MicroVMs for stronger isolation, while Bolt.new uses WebAssembly-based WebContain

Solo, bootstrapped, minimal

Okay, so if you're not into building a big startup with investors and splitting equity, you can try going solo and bootstrapped. Will it work for you? I don't know. It works for me, as far as I can tell - and I'm a tech person - by no means a genius, but I still can package technology into a product. This post is an attempt to organize my scattered and fragmented observations and thoughts about bootstrapping small SaaS products - into a long (and still disjointed) text. The freedom of being

Building n8n web crawler for RAG

This week, I’m introducing a new project at ScrapeNinja: a recursive web crawler, packed into an n8n community node. It isn’t just another scraper - it’s an advanced, powerful open-source tool that executes in your local n8n instance and can be used to harvest huge amounts of data, for example I use it to consolidate technical documentation (many web pages) into a clean Markdown file that I can feed into a large language model (LLM) for retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and other advanced use

Web scraping in n8n

I am a big fan of n8n and I am using it for a lot of my projects. I love that it provides a self-hosted version and this self-hosted version is not paywalled like if often happens with so-called "open core" products which just use "open source" as a marketing term. Web scraping in n8n can be both simple and sophisticated, depending on your approach and tools. In this blog post, I will explore two ways of scraping: basic HTTP requests and advanced scraping techniques using ScrapeNinja n8n int

In-depth comparison of Lovable.dev and Bolt.new

I extensively use AI tools for coding - primarily Claude Sonnet 3.5 in VS Code Copilot and the OpenAI ChatGPT macOS app (using the 01 and 40 models) as of December 2024. While these tools, which felt groundbreaking just months ago, have become an integral part of my daily workflow, I see significant room for improvement in AI code tools, particularly in UX and approach. Despite progress, I still spend a lot of time copying and pasting between tools. While VS Code Copilot’s code edits and AI aut