
Welcome,
My name is Christian Olear, also known to many as Otsch – a full-stack web developer with a backend focus and many years of PHP experience, based in Linz (🇦🇹).
I can support you with:
- the development of tailored web apps and APIs,
- modernizing PHP legacy systems, and especially
- projects involving web crawling and scraping – my specialty.
Feel free to get in touch – I’m curious to hear about your project!
Get in touch!
Services
Web App Development
Are you planning a web project that goes beyond a typical, static company website? Do you need tailored functionality? Maybe you’re even planning to build a SaaS application? Then you’re in the right place. I develop solid, custom web apps and REST APIs.
Read morePHP Legacy Modernization
You have an existing PHP project that’s a bit outdated? It lacks tests, a clear structure – maybe it was even built entirely without a framework? Making changes is becoming increasingly risky and time-consuming? I’ll help you modernize the code step by step – carefully and transparently.
Read moreWeb Crawling & Scraping
You’re planning a project that involves continuously collecting data from across the web - automatically and at scale? That’s my specialty! I’m the developer of the PHP library crwlr.software and the SaaS service crwl.io, which is built on top of it. I’m happy to support you in planning and implementing your solution.
Read moreWhat My Clients Say

Die Zusammenarbeit mit Otsch war für uns enorm hilfreich: Er hat nicht nur unsere ersten Crawler in crwl.io konfiguriert und uns damit den Einstieg deutlich erleichtert, sondern auch individuelle Extraktionslogik programmiert und uns jederzeit schnell und kompetent unterstützt. Seine Erfahrung im Bereich Web Crawling war in jeder Phase spürbar.
Blog
Have you ever deployed your website or web app, only to discover hours later that you’ve introduced bugs or broken links? Or do you clear the cache with every deploy, leaving the first users to experience slow performance? In this guide, you’ll learn how to use a crawler to automatically detect errors and warm the cache, ensuring your site runs smoothly after every deployment.
Read moreVersion 1.8 of the crwlr/crawler package is out, introducing key new functions that will replace existing ones in v2.0. Addressing previous issues with composing crawling result data, this update provides a solution that enhances performance, minimizes memory usage further, and simplifies the process, making it more intuitive and easier to understand.
Read moreSince working with generators can be a bit tricky if you're new to them, this post offers an intro on how to use them and highlights common pitfalls to avoid.
Read moreAbstract classes cannot be instantiated directly, posing a challenge when testing functionality implemented within the abstract class itself. In this article, I will share my approach to addressing this issue.
Read moreThis is the first article of our "Crwlr Recipes" series, providing a collection of thoroughly explained code examples for specific crawling and scraping use-cases. This first article describes how you can crawl any website fully (all pages) and extract the data of schema.org structured data objects from all its pages, with just a few lines of code.
Read moreIs it decreasing and what to do about it?
My friend Florian Bauer recently posted an article saying that PHP needs a rebranding and that he would rename it to HypeScript. Here's my two cents on that subject.
Read moreI'm very proud to announce that version 1.0 of the crawler package is finally released. This article gives you an overview of why you should use this library for your web crawling and scraping jobs.
Read moreVersion 0.6 is probably the biggest update so far with a lot of new features and steps from crawling whole websites, over sitemaps to extracting metadata and schema.org structured data from HTML. Here is an overview of all the new stuff.
Read moreWe're already at v0.5 of the crawler package and this version comes with a lot of new features and improvements. Here's a quick overview of what's new.
Read moreThere is a new package in town called query-string. It allows to create, access and manipulate query strings for HTTP requests in a very convenient way. Here's a quick overview of what you can do with it and also how it can be used via the url package.
Read more