Five web-data vendors, 400 lines of glue: every bug this quarter lived in the glue
cup_cake009 · reddit · 2026-10-24
A developer counted his company's web data vendors and found five: a search API, a scraping API, a separate PDF extraction service (the scraper mangles tables), a company enrichment provider, plus a Playwright box for the three sites that defeat all of the above.
His takeaway resonated widely: money isn't the problem — each vendor is fine individually. The problem is 400 lines of glue whose only job is making five services agree on what a timeout means, and every bug he's hit this quarter lived in that glue, not in any vendor. The kicker: the enrichment vendor was cancelled in August and nobody told him, "which I think says something."
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