When his father needed to find a person inside a 23-year-old electoral roll, manual searching meant opening and reading 305 government PDFs one by one. Instead, this data engineer reverse-engineered the portal, extracted part lists through hidden APIs, automated PDF retrieval with Playwright, and searched documents using PyMuPDF and multilingual matching. A task that could have taken days was solved in hours—and became a reminder that engineering isn’t always about scale; sometimes it’s about gi...