Writer’s Brief

The Hook

Every LinkedIn scraper I tried returned zero results. Seven different tools, zero posts. The fix was one character.

Main Points to Cover

  1. The username alexdobrenko vs alex-dobrenko - one hyphen made every API call fail silently
  2. Silent failures are the worst kind - no error messages, just empty arrays. You assume the tool is broken when it’s your input.
  3. The meta-lesson: when everything fails the same way, the problem is probably upstream of all of them

The Angle

Debugging story. The comedy of trying 7 different tools before realizing the input was wrong the whole time.

Target Reader

Anyone who builds with APIs, anyone who’s ever spent way too long on something dumb

Tone Notes

Self-deprecating, funny, short. The punchline IS the hyphen.

Raw Material / Moments to Write From

These are notes for Alex to write from. Not prose.

  • Tried 7 different Apify actors. All returned empty. Started blaming Apify, LinkedIn’s anti-scraping, the actors themselves.
  • The actors that “failed”: harvestapi, curious_coder (expired trial), supreme_coder (wrong input format), anchor (not found), and more
  • Some returned cryptic errors: “The profile is hidden or private”, “Could not extract URN from profile” - all because the profile literally didn’t exist
  • The fix: alexdobrenko -> alex-dobrenko. One hyphen.
  • The agent that finally figured it out checked the actual LinkedIn URL and found the hyphen
  • Cost of the actual working call: $0.05 for 10 posts. Cost of finding the hyphen: ~45 minutes of API calls
  • There’s a general principle here about debugging: when N different tools all fail the same way, stop blaming the tools