📰 Dev.to · Alex Spinov

Eight free scholarly APIs (arXiv, Crossref, OpenAlex, DataCite, Unpaywall, DOAJ, OpenCitations, Zenodo) that return paper metadata, DOIs, citations, and open-ac

On July 8, 2026 I looked up a barcode that does not exist. Eight zeros. I sent them to Open Food...

On July 6, 2026 I asked REST Countries for the United States. It answered HTTP 200. Green light, ship...

Everyone reaches for OpenCorporates, gets back 401 Invalid Api Token, and concludes that clean...

Eight free geocoding APIs with no key and no signup, each re-verified with a live curl in July 2026.

An AI agent doesn't need a paid data vendor to read the web. These eleven REST APIs return real data...

A strict assert == golden fails on every valid agent run. Here is a deterministic gate over a non-deterministic output, with the case it misses printed in the s

Every MCP web-access tutorial I read this month pointed at a paid API. You don't need one. To let an...

Your scheduled scraper re-downloaded the whole corpus last night. A few thousand records. About forty...

I gave an agent a fetch_page tool, asked it to read one Wikipedia article, and watched that single...

A site can detect your scraper and serve a 200 with a perfect schema and plausible values that are deliberately false. Status codes and sanity checks are blind

A scraper run finished green. Exit 0. Schema valid. Row count looked normal. So did the one before...

A scraper can pass every check you wrote and still be wrong about the one thing you actually care...

A stdlib probe that reads the raw HTTP response and votes NO_BROWSER, JS_REQUIRED, or MAYBE. I ran it on 10 named public URLs; 6 returned their data without Chr

A proxy invoice that says 24.79 GB · $198.28 reads like you bought 24.79 GB of data. You didn't. You...

Spend alerts fire after the money is gone. A budget brake refuses the next step before it spends. A 40-line preventive fuse, run locally with real output, plus

Nine LLM APIs with a genuinely free tier and no credit card in 2026 — limits, OpenAI-compatibility, and which survive an extraction workload. Verified May 2026.

A scraper that returns HTTP 200 is not a scraper that returns good data. Those are two different...

There's a whole wave of posts right now telling you the same thing: don't feed raw HTML to your LLM,...

Originally published on my blog. This is the focused, runnable version of one section. There's a...

5 Apify webhook patterns that turn one-off scrapers into reliable data pipelines This...

Bun's built-in test runner: zero config, Jest-compatible, 10x faster. import { describe, it,...

Fresh is Deno's web framework. Zero JavaScript shipped to the client by default. Interactive parts...

Remix v2 ditches the file-based routing complexity of Next.js and gives you nested routes with...