Context
Mr Hardware is a website created during my time as a technical student to compare hardware products from different stores in Chile. Products are updated daily (scraping) and users can compare prices, availability and product specifications.
Goal
The purpose of this project was to help people find their products at the best price, with feedback from the community leading to better purchases. The application aimed to improve on what some existing websites already do, but with extra options and a stronger focus on computer hardware.
Design
The layout was designed with my team in Figma; from the beginning we wanted users who are not so familiar with computers to easily find what they are looking for. As for the site's logo (a robot), I designed it with Adobe Illustrator and animated it with Adobe After Effects and LottieFiles. Although I was not familiar with these tools, they were a great help for the visual appeal.
Scraping
The products shown on the site were extracted from other pages using web scraping. At the time it seemed difficult and challenging, since I only knew scraping in theory and wanted to do it with Python, a language I had never used — but it turned out to be easy to pick up thanks to a solid programming foundation. My scraping script was somewhat complex: it was a cron job that validated new products and updated any change in their specifications without having to run the whole process again.
Tools used
