2000 I started programming at age eight with Visual Basic 6. Growing up in rural Bangladesh with limited internet access, I quickly realized that web scraping wasn't just a skill—it was survival. The cost of staying online was simply too high.
2004 I began scraping websites using VB6's MSHTML library. By downloading tutorials and forum content for offline reading, I saved enough money to keep learning. That necessity became a passion—I started exploring every tool I could find: CURL, WGET, sockets, browser macros, and later Selenium.
2008 I started building mobile apps for GetJar and Nokia's Ovi Store using J2ME. By then, I was proficient in Java, PHP, and Python. The transition to Android app development soon followed.
2014 I built an enterprise-level search engine with a web-crawling operation that processed 10-25 million pages daily—handling 4-8 TB of data. Most of the infrastructure ran on Apache Solr, with scrapers written in Python, PHP, and C. Anti-bot detection, CAPTCHAs, rate limiting—I'd learned to work around them all.
2025 To sum it up: I started programming because I wanted to scrape websites. It's been about 25 years now, and I never really stopped. Web scraping and reverse engineering aren't just what I do—they're why I code.