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.

Cheerio: parse HTML in Javascript. Playground and cheatsheet

Cheerio is a de-facto standard to parse HTML in a server-side Javascript (Node.js) now. It is a fast, flexible, and lean implementation of jQuery-like syntax designed specifically for the server. Github: https://github.com/cheeriojs/cheerio Stars: 25.8K NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/cheerio Cheerio is a pretty performant solution to extract data from raw HTML web pages, and is perfect for web scraping tasks when you don't need real browser rendering or you just don't want to use Puppetee

What are USDT transfer fees now in BEP20, ERC20, TRC20?

Have you ever wondered what is the best blockchain to send USDT and why Ethereum blockchain is so expensive (is it?) in terms of gas fees, and what is the best alternative? I did. So, this is my new weekend project. It was built using 11ty for landing website, and Ethers for blockchain requests. Disclaimer: I am not a world-class expert in blockchains, I am still learning it. But I am good at building products, and I have my 15 years of software development experience in a product-focused comp

How to remove background from a signature: 3 tools

Let's say you want to sign some PDF with you "real" human signature. Of course you can draw your signature using your mouse or touchpad, but this "fully digital" signature usually turns out to be really ugly and pale version of your slick signature you are used to write when signing physical documents. Another way would be to take a a photo of your signature, on your phone, and then properly condition this photo so it is cleaned up, and the background is removed, so the signature can be put on e

Puppeteer: click an element and get raw JSON from XHR/AJAX response

This lately became a pretty popular question when scraping with Puppeteer: let's say you want to interact with the page (e.g. click the button) and retrieve the raw ajax response (usually, JSON). Why would you want to do this? This is actually an interesting "hybrid" approach to extracting data from the web page - while we interact with the page like a real browser, we still do not mess around with the usual DOM traversing process to extract the data, and we grab raw JSON server response instea

Puppeteer API service for web scraping

Okay, let's admit it - web scraping via Puppeteer and Playwright is the most versatile and flexible way of web scraping nowadays. Unfortunately it's also the most cumbersome, time consuming way of scraping, and sometimes it feels a little bit like voodoo magic. This is a post about my long & painful journey on how I was taming real Chrome browser, controlled programmatically via Puppeteer, for my web scraping needs. First and foremost: do not use real Chrome browser for scraping unless it is a

Morning sports is my happiness magic pill

I am an indie hacker and CTO in my mid-thirties, and my life improved so much a few years ago when morning activity magic clicked for me. After a period of burnout, reduced productivity, when I became older, and less excited in tech and programming, this was like a renaissance for me, when I was able to start a number of small SaaS businesses which required high concentration, new skills, and productivity, and one of major factors which allowed me to do this, and improved the quality of my life