On May 31, I received an email that meant a lot to me.
My project was selected for the shortlist of the UN Global Hackathon on Using AI for Digital Trade Regulatory Analysis, among 129 teams from 30 countries.
As a self-taught indie developer without a computer science degree or big-tech background, seeing that email was both exciting and surreal.
But the real challenge started after the acceptance.
Over the past few days, I've been studying the competition framework, regulatory datasets, and evaluation criteria while building an AI research agent that can crawl, parse, and analyze digital trade regulations across different jurisdictions.
Today, after an entire day of debugging, I finally got the Singapore legislation pipeline running end-to-end.
Along the way I discovered that:
• The main legislation page doesn't contain the actual provision text
• The real content is hidden behind a specific provision endpoint
• Sections and subsections require custom parsing
• Multiple date fields can break metadata extraction
• A 200 OK response doesn't always mean you have valid content
• Status pages can easily masquerade as real legislation pages
The funny part is that a few months ago, I probably would have assumed:
• My VPS was blocked
• My IP was banned
• I needed residential proxies
• I needed Playwright and stealth tooling
• I needed another dozen scraping libraries
Instead, the solution turned out to be much simpler:
A correct URL is often worth more than ten proxies.
One lesson I've learned as a developer is that the biggest obstacle is rarely technical complexity itself — it's the wrong assumptions we make before investigating the problem.
Back to building. More countries to support, more regulations to analyze, and a lot more work ahead.
Top comments (0)