Explorations in Puppeteer and Playwright

I have been working on a project that requires me to interact with a website and scrape data from it. I have been using Puppeteer and Playwright to accomplish this task. I have been able to automate the process of navigating to the website, perform some operations, and scrape the data I need. This has been a huge time saver and has allowed our to focus on other aspects of the project.

The time saved from performing repetitive tasks manually, like copy pasting and clicking through a website, has been so valuable. This type of work didn’t seem possible to me, even a year ago. I was still just trying to learn the basics and get my feet wet with coding. Now, I am able to automate tasks that would have taken me hours to do manually. I have helped automate several other tasks and I am feeling the value I bring to our team.

Like any new library or technology, there is a learning curve. Puppeteer and Playwright have nice documentation. I also feel like I am learning how to balance using Google-Fu skills with referring to the source information. There are instances where one will get you to your answer quicker than the other. Learning those nuances has been a fun challenge as well as increases productivity.