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Scalable Data Harvesting for AI

Event artwork for Scalable Data Harvesting for AI

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About this event

What to expect

Every AI pipeline starts with one question: where does the data come from? This hands-on workshop from PyLadies Amsterdam tackles that challenge head-on, teaching you to build robust data harvesting systems using Scrapy, one of Python's most powerful web scraping frameworks. Whether you're training machine learning models, building AI agents, or conducting data analysis, this workshop will equip you with the skills to extract structured data from the web at scale.

What You'll Learn

Starting from a blank project, you'll build a working spider capable of harvesting structured data ready for AI pipelines. The workshop covers:

  • Framework comparison: Understanding when to use Scrapy versus lighter tools like Requests & Beautiful Soup
  • Data extraction fundamentals: Using CSS selectors to pull information from HTML
  • Scale and automation: Following links and handling pagination across multiple pages
  • Structured output: Writing clean, formatted data to files for downstream processing
  • Ethics and legality: Navigating the legal and ethical considerations of web scraping

For those wanting to push further, there's a bonus "Gold Star" chapter on scraping JavaScript-rendered pages—a crucial skill when dealing with modern web applications.

Who Should Attend

This workshop assumes basic Python knowledge but requires no prior web scraping experience. It's ideal for data scientists, AI practitioners, and developers who need to collect training data, build datasets, or automate data gathering for their projects. The hands-on format means you'll leave with working code and practical skills you can apply immediately.

Event Format

This is a hybrid event, offering both in-person attendance at Fairphone B.V. in Amsterdam and online participation via YouTube stream. The schedule runs from 18:00-21:00 CEST, with the workshop starting at 18:30 and followed by networking time for in-person attendees. All materials will be available via the GitHub repository.

PyLadies Amsterdam creates welcoming spaces for women and non-binary people in the Python community, though events are open to all who support their mission. Join their community on the PyLadies Global Slack workspace in the #city-amsterdam channel.

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