There’s one major problem with ChromeDriver: anti-bot services are able to detect that a browser session is being automated (as opposed to being used by a regular meat sack) and will often impose restrictions or deny connections altogether. The Undetected ChromeDriver (undetected-chromedriver) Python package is a patched version of ...

A linter and a styler can help you to write cleaner and more consistent code. In this post we’ll look at how to set up both for a Python project.

I’m building a model which requires historical weather data from a selection of locations in South Africa. In this post I demonstrate the process of acquiring the data and doing some simple processing.

I occasionally write scripts where I need to persist some information between runs. These scripts are often wrapped in a Docker image and deployed on Amazon ECS. This means that there is no persistent storage. I could use a database, but this would be overkill for the volume of data ...

I’ve just started collaborating on a new project, Votela, with Luke. We’re going to be using Firestore for stashing our data. I’ve never worked with Firestore before, so one of my first tasks was just figuring out how to get connected and how to shift some data ...

In two previous posts we’ve looked at how to set up a simple scraper which uses Selenium in Docker, communicating via the host network and bridge network. Both of those setups have involved launching separate containers for the scraper and Selenium. In this post we’ll see how to ...

In the previous post we set up a scraper template which used Selenium on Docker via the host network. Now we’re going to do essentially the same thing but using a bridge network. Default Network We’ll start by using Docker’s default bridge network. docker network ls NETWORK ...

I was asked to review “Mastering Python Scientific Computing” (authored by Hemant Kumar Mehta and published in 2015 by Packt Publishing). I was disappointed by the book. The title lead me to believe that it would help me to achiev...

I’ve just finished reading Beautiful Data (published by O’Reilly in 2009), a collection of essays edited by Toby Segaran and Jeff Hammerbacher. The 20 essays from 39 contributors address a diverse array of topics relating to data a...