otsch.codes
Illustration of Christian Olear (Otsch) working at his laptop

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:

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.

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🕵🏻‍♂️

PHP 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You have an existing PHP project that’s a bit outdated?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.

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🕷️

Web 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.

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What My Clients Say

Foto von Rudolf Bede-Kussberger
Rudolf Bede-Kussberger
Newsadoo

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

Crwlr Recipes: Using a Crawler for Website Error Detection and Cache Warming
crwlr.software
2025-01-20

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.

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Crawler v1.8: Paving the Way to a Better v2.0
crwlr.software
2024-06-05

Version 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.

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A Quickstart Tutorial on PHP Generators
crwlr.software
2024-06-05

Since 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.

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Testing Abstract Classes in PHP using Anonymous Classes
otsch.codes
2023-11-24

Abstract 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.

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Crwlr Recipes: How to Scan any Website for schema.org Structured Data Objects
crwlr.software
2023-11-16

This 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.

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PoPHPularity
Is it decreasing and what to do about it?
otsch.codes
2023-03-01

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.

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10 good Reasons to use the crwlr Library
crwlr.software
2023-02-08

I'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.

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What's new in crwlr / crawler v0.6?
crwlr.software
2022-10-03

Version 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.

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What's new in crwlr / crawler v0.5?
crwlr.software
2022-09-03

We'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.

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Dealing with HTTP (Url) Query Strings in PHP
crwlr.software
2022-06-02

There 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.

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