Building a Tiny Bit of Magic: How InBuddy Learned to Read LinkedIn’s Schedule
Summary
Automating the extraction and visualization of LinkedIn scheduled posts can solve the frustration of lacking a proper editorial calendar view. By mimicking user interactions instead of relying on brittle API access, this approach demonstrates building a lightweight utility that aggregates post data into calendar and table views. Salesforce teams facing UI limitations or schedule visibility challenges can learn from this automation pattern to create focused tools that improve their workflows and clarity without heavy backend dependencies. This example highlights practical UI automation and incremental development using coding co-pilots, valuable for crafting custom utility extensions or integration helpers.
Takeaways
- Automate UI interactions when APIs are unavailable or restricted.
- Extract structured data by simulating disciplined user behavior on web UIs.
- Use incremental code generation tools to speed up development iterations.
- Store extracted data locally for flexible calendar and table views.
- Focus on solving specific workflow pain with lightweight, laser-focused utilities.
Imagine planning a LinkedIn post… …only to realize later that you’ve scheduled it in the totally wrong slot. LinkedIn’s UI is great for writing posts, but when it comes to seeing your entire editorial schedule , it’s like trying to navigate a star map with half the constellations missing. You see one scheduled post at a time, no real calendar, no conflict detection. Just vibes. At some point I thought: “Why not build a small InBuddy utility that downloads all my scheduled posts and shows them on a proper calendar?” That tiny spark set off a surprisingly fun chain of engineering experiments. From annoyance to “automation magic” The initial idea was straightforward: Build something inside InBuddy that: opens LinkedIn, grabs all scheduled posts, and displays them in a calendar and a filterable list. My first attempt was the “obvious” one: use LinkedIn’s APIs . And of course… it failed spectacularly (for the right reasons).