Fiona Margaret

Building an API that pulls data across 13 social platforms, and the thing that's eaten the most engineering time isn't the scraping itself, it's how differently every platform breaks. Rate limits that change without notice, auth flows that expire silently, structured data one week and a wall of JS the next.

Curious what's bitten other builders here. Which platform has been the worst to depend on, and what did you end up doing about it?

heyy folks .. am haider, the solo dev behind PopTask .. i'm launching a big update here on july 7 (it's now on iphone + ipad, not just mac) and figured i'd start a conversation instead of just showing up launch day

the whole thing started from one annoyance: every to-do app makes me fill out a form for a 2-second thought .. title, date, time, repeat, reminder .. and by the time am done i've half-forgotten why i opened it .. so i built the opposite: you type the mess the way you'd say it ("gym mon wed fri 6am") and it becomes a real scheduled task in about 3 seconds, no forms

For me, it's usually Downloads.

Thousands of screenshots, random PDFs, ZIP files, invoices, images, and files named things like:

final_v2_FINAL_really_final.pdf