Have you ever had to migrate data from one platform to another?

We recently got such a request while moving from the widely used Transportation Management System, Sylectus, to a custom-built solution.

The initial estimation?

• 6 weeks
• A team of 3 people
• Manually copy-pasting every vehicle and all related data

Instead, I spent a weekend building a Python-based Scrapy crawler that automated the entire process.

• No more repetitive manual work
• Thousands saved in effort and cost
• And here’s the bonus: we could now recreate the database on demand using real-world data, which was incredibly helpful for testing the new system under realistic conditions.

This kind of automation doesn't just save time—it makes your dev and QA process smoother and far more efficient.

Check out the sample code on GitHub

If you're planning a similar migration, feel free to try it out—and skip the pain of copy-pasting.