2026-10 Call me Ahab: Webscraping tooling, approaches and dataset obsession

Presentation - Call me Ahab: Webscraping tooling, approaches and obsession with white whale datasets
Webscraping isn't one thing, or done for one reason. Drawing on scrapers built in very different forms, from once-a-minute API pollers to fleets that run for years to keep full mirrors, this talk breaks webscraping down across spectra and considerations. Its opportunity is as wide as the internet, and it gets harder to reach every year. Unbounded wants come with unbounded costs: time, effort, money, and risk.

We'll cover libraries and architectural choices, where agentic and ML tools can fit, and scaling traps. You might already have a white whale, too.

Where: Platform Calgary, East Annex
When: Wednesday, October 28, at 5:30 PM
Schedule:
5:30 - Pizza and Networking
6:00 - Presentations and Discussion
7:30 - Wrap up

Presenter:
Michael Moores (Consultant & Cybersecurity Educator) has spent years as a Senior Solutions Engineer in cybersecurity. His career has meandered across risk, cybersecurity, product, and data. He has the anomalous achievement of having sent phishing emails to astronauts.