Engineering Blog
Technical deep-dives, infrastructure case studies, and open-source tooling from the team that built Optimal.
InfrastructureFeatured
How We Built a Distributed Edge Scraping Network on Raspberry Pis
Real-world grocery price data requires real-world IP addresses. Our fleet of Raspberry Pi nodes gives us residential-grade access to retail APIs — at 1/10th the cost of proxies.
April 10, 20268 min readRead more
Data
Reverse Engineering Grocery Store APIs: A Technical Deep Dive
None of the major grocery chains publish public APIs. Here's how we reverse-engineered their mobile apps to extract structured pricing data at scale.
Mar 28, 202610 min
ML
Using pgvector for Fuzzy Product Matching Across 1,000+ Stores
Matching 'Kirkland Organic Whole Milk 1 gal' to 'Costco Whole Milk Organic 128 oz' is a solved problem with vector embeddings. Here's our implementation.
Mar 5, 20267 min
Product
Optimal Data LLC: The Holding Company Architecture
Why we structured Optimal as a holding company from day one, and how that shapes our technology portfolio strategy.
Feb 14, 20265 min