Built a Trello Power-Up in 1 hour after stalking my ex on LinkedIn

I’m currently preparing for the AWS ML certification, and my brain is fried.
So I take breaks — scroll the internet, “rest”, you know.

And somehow I ended up on my ex’s LinkedIn.
(We broke up 10 years ago.)

He’s now a PhD and a Senior Partner at McKinsey.

Great 👍

Instant mood drop.
Followed by: “ok I need to get my life together immediately.”

So I opened my folder with research papers I’d been procrastinating on…
Turns out I had 7 unfinished/submittable papers.

I started submitting them like crazy.

And very quickly:

• some got rejected

• some asked for revisions

• some needed additional documents

• some just disappeared into the void

And I realized:

I’m about to get crushed not by McKinsey, but by my own submission chaos.

So I built a tool.

What I built

A simple Trello Power-Up to track research paper submissions:

Each card shows structured rows like:

• paper — date — journal — rejected 🔴

• paper — date — journal — under review 🟡

• paper — date — journal — accepted 🟢

Inside the card — full tracking.
On the front — clean overview.

Build

• Time: ~1 hour

• Stack: HTML, JS, CSS, Trello API

• Experience: This is my 6th Power-Up, so I basically had a template ready

It got approved on the first try.

Pricing

Freemium:

• free version includes everything essential

• $2.99/month or $19.99/year to remove the “Upgrade” badge

Takeaway

Sometimes you don’t need:

• market research

• validation

• perfect idea

Sometimes you just need:

a mildly successful ex on LinkedIn

Wishing everyone:

• motivating exes

• fast builds

• and fewer manual workflows 🙃