This week my group and I worked on a FireFox browser extension. This was my first time working on an open source project. This was also my first time working on a CS project with other people. At first I was a little intimidated. I dont know how to code in JavaSCript and I never was involved in an Open Scource project. Howevr, working on this extension this week allowed me to get the hang of the concept of contributing to group projects and open source projects.

THe group and I came up with the idea to create an extension called “Light Switch.” The light switch extension detects the user time, and turns on or off the decorations for the light in accordance to the time. For instance, during the day time the light is off. During the night, the light is off. The user has the option of manually select the state of the light switch as well.

Working with a group for this project allowed me to learn from my group members while contributing with them. I do not know how to code in JavaScript of HTML. My two other group members do. We divided the work load amongst ourselves. I did all the documentations and created the repository. I worked along with my group members to create the code and extension to ensure that it works properly on our machines.

We made a lot of progress with our extension. Our extension is nearly done. Howevr, along the way we did face challenges.In the beginning, we were discussing creating a theme changer, that does the same thing but with the page theme. After discussing and trying to implement that with my group members, we slightly modified it to make it more do-able for us. The theme changer proved to be too difficult to create because to create a theme changer, we would have to make a dynamic template for the browser. We found that we can’t change a browsers template through an extension. So we modified our extension idea.

I learned a lot about group projects by working on this extension. Such as how to divide up workload and work through challenges and disagreements together. Also, before I was not familiar with reading JavaScript files. After working on this extension, I am confident enough to read JavaScript and understand what the code is trying to do.