[Day 19] Zero to MVP in 30 Days — Getting Full Access to a Third Party Service

In this series I’ll validate a new idea. Read about the concept here (Day 0) and the idea here (Day 1).

Since I don’t have a lot about the project in general to tell, I want to share something specific with you today.

For Find Better Questions I have to scrape Quora. The special challenge is that the user has to be logged in to do so.

Scraping Quora as User with Electron Webviews

Electron (Framework for building desktop apps with JS) offers something called webview. It’s basically a browser view which can be controlled from within your app.

Electron keeps cookies and other temporary data, so you just have to ask your user once to log in at the normal place. No need to manage any user data and third party passwords.

This is executed in the main Node.js environment

Just write your JS-code which scrapes the data you need.

This code is executed in the webview (Browser)

Tada 🎉

Your app now has full access to a third party app.

The plan for tomorrow

Panic, I’m running out of time

← Day 18 — Talking about the Product

→ Day 20 — Defining a Schema