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.

My experience using n8n, from a developer perspective

1.5 years ago, I wrote a blog post sharing my thoughts and experience on using Make.com, Zapier, and Pipedream from my perspective (I recommend reading that piece before continuing here). When exploring these awesome platforms, I was mostly interested in how no-code and low-code products can enhance my life as a developer. My goal is to minimize coding and increase my output. UPD 2025: more of my n8n blog posts: * n8n vs real coding for SaaS products * Web scraping in n8n My technical backg

Self-hosted is awesome

I'm a big fan of self-hosting. As an indie hacker who has launched several micro-SaaS products and as a CTO of a small company, I now prefer self-hosting all the tools I might need. With the rise of high-quality self-hosted offerings from talented teams using open source as their primary marketing channel while offering a cloud version of their product to generate revenue, we can save tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars over the lifetime of our projects, while maintaining full control over

Learning French with ChatGPT

Duolingo and flashcards get boring quickly, so lately I've been learning French with ChatGPT. Observation #1: ChatGPT for Android got a very good speech-to-text and text-to-speech engine based on Whisper, since fall 2023. It understands what you say well and intones its phrases nicely when it speaks. You can have real conversations with it on any topic. Of course, it's still far from being a human tutor in terms of analyzing your pronunciation, because what essentially reaches ChatGPT cloud is

How to keep your product alive: poor man's SRE

Let's imagine your product didn't die and managed to gain some real traction (🎉 CONGRATULATIONS!). After a few years it stops being a small and nimble project and turns into something much bigger, involving dozens and hundreds of people. Project lifecycle: MVP -> growth -> maintenance What does a full-stack engineer of a new project think about? Exciting questions: what programming language to choose, Bootstrap vs Tailwind, React vs vue.js, services or microservices, and so on. "How to build

How to set proxy in Python Requests

Introduction As a seasoned developer with a keen interest in web scraping and data extraction, I've often leveraged Python for its simplicity and power. In this realm, understanding and utilizing proxies becomes a necessity, especially to navigate through the complexities of web requests, IP bans, and rate limiting. In this article, I'll share my insights and experiences on using proxies with Python's Requests library. We'll start from the basics and gradually move to more advanced techniques l

How to set proxy in Playwright

In this article I will describe how to set a proxy in Playwright (Node.js version of Playwright). Playwright is obviously one of the best and most modern solutions to automate browsers in 2024. It uses the CDP protocol to send commands to browsers and supports Chromium, Chrome and Firefox browsers out of the box. It is open source and very well maintained. It's main use case is UI test automation and web scraping. Setting up proxies is useful for both of these use cases - especially for web scr