Developer finds 23% of Dev.to articles silently deleted after building custom data scraper

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A developer discovered that 235 of their 847 supposedly published Dev.to articles had been quietly soft-deleted by the platform between 2019 and 2023, with no user notification. The discrepancy only came to light after the developer built a custom Python scraper using the standard library alone, bypassing third-party packages to pull nine years of personal posting history. The project also exposed a memory management problem with Dev.to's API, where joining article data with reactions and comments caused in-memory JSON to balloon from roughly 510 MB to several gigabytes, crashing an 8 GB cloud instance. To solve this, the developer restructured the workflow as a streaming pipeline with bounded queues, batched writes, and a token-bucket rate limiter, all without external dependencies. The build highlighted how platform-reported metrics can diverge significantly from a user's actual content record.

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