I came across a fascinating discussion online about someone who built a fully self-hosted web scraping infrastructure using 50 Raspberry Pi nodes, and honestly, it’s been rattling around in my head for days now. Not because it’s the most efficient solution—quite the opposite, actually—but because it represents something I find increasingly rare in our field: building something just to see if you can.

The setup is admittedly bonkers. Fifty Raspberry Pis, each running Chrome via Selenium, each with its own VPN connection, all coordinated to scrape job postings. The whole thing is local—no cloud services, just hardware sitting in someone’s home, collecting 3.9 million records over two years. There’s even an IoT power strip that automatically power-cycles nodes when they stop responding. It’s automated chaos, and I kind of love it.