2026-03-22 –, Yuchengco Hall 5th Flr. Y507 (Workshop Room 1)
The Creator Developer Economy is rapidly reshaping how developers turn technical skills into sustainable, independent income. In this session, we’ll explore practical ways developers can build, deploy, and monetize data-driven automation and web-scraping solutions—using both open-source tools and hosted platforms.
This talk will walk through the full lifecycle of creating production-ready scrapers and automation workflows in four steps:
Development – Comparing popular open-source scraping and automation tools such as Crawlee for Python, Scrapy, Playwright, and Selenium, and discussing when to choose each.
Publication & Monetization Setup – Exploring options for distributing your tools, from publishing open-source packages to hosting reusable “agents” on platforms like Apify or deploying them independently.
Testing & Reliability – Demonstrating best practices for debugging, monitoring, and scaling scraping/automation solutions.
Promotion & Community Building – Sharing strategies for developer visibility: documentation, GitHub presence, community engagement, Discord groups, and contributing to open-source ecosystems.
The session will also feature a live demo showing how to quickly build and deploy an automation workflow using the Apify CLI alongside examples built with open-source alternatives. Attendees will see how different tools approach the same problem, helping them make informed architectural choices.
To conclude, we’ll highlight real stories of developers who have built meaningful income streams—both through open-source projects and through hosted automation platforms—illustrating the diverse opportunities in today’s developer-led economy.
Saurav is a Senior Developer Advocate at Apify. He has built and managed various developer communities, starting developer relations programs from scratch and scaling them to support thousands of developers globally.
His experience as a speaker at various conferences worldwide, spanning four continents and 25+ countries, has helped thousands of developers learn more about Apify's creator economy and earn money through their monetization skills.
He loves to explore new technologies, talk with developers, and travel.
I am a software engineer at Apify, and use both JavaScript and Python for my job.