> Web scraping. It's something we all love to hate. You wish the data you needed to power your app, model or visualization was available via API. But, most of the time it's not. So, you decide to build a web scraper. You write a ton of code, employ a laundry list of libraries and techniques, all for something that's by definition unstable, has to be hosted somewhere, and needs to be maintained over time.

I disagree. Web scraping is mostly fun. You don't need "a ton of code" and "a laundry list of libraries", just something like Beautiful Soup and maybe XSLT.

The end of the statement is truer: it's not really a problem that your web scraper will have to be hosted somewhere, since the thing you're using it for also has to be hosted somewhere, but yes, it needs to be maintained and it will break if the source changes.

But I don't see how this solution could ever be able to automatically evolve with the source, without the original developer doing anything?