A Couple of Takeaways from Working in a Group

• Communicate early about the plan. It might be a good idea to delegate tasks from the start so that everyone at least has something they know they should be working on from the get-go. Once those tasks are distributed and understood, it can make future contributions more organic as people start asking for help or when the time comes to integrate these separate tasks into a cohesive project.
• Use deadlines to help guide the process. A problem that our group ran into is that we completed the bulk of the work on the last day before the extension was due. Because we were stressing over getting pretty much all of our work done in that one session, our code was definitely not as clean as it could have been, and we didn’t pay too much mind to all of the factors involved in an open source project (think licensing, code of conduct guidelines, etc). We definitely would have been more thorough in our work had we spread out our sessions more evenly.
• Git is your friend. Commit and commit often. Keeping track of the changes to your fork as well as changes to the original repository is a godsend. Being able to quickly update or revert your files on your local machine allows for much smoother collaboration and easier contributions. Testing your code locally and sharing those changes easily allows for others to check your work and easily help without having to crowd around the same screen.

My Favorite Projects Presented in Class

• Word to Pet was a really neat little extension that turned all mentions of certain pets into their respective images. I liked the extension because it showed me a way to modify a page that I hadn’t thought about before. I’ve seen extensions that replace images with different, possibly more amusing ones, but I never thought to replace words with pictures. This is an even more amusing method of page modification, in my opinion.
• Table of Contents was one extension that definitely wow’ed me for it’s simple yet amazingly practical concept. Page jumps are staples of HTML and many websites, and yet it never occured to me to try to make page jumps available on every website. With a great looking and intuitive interface as well as superb function, Table of Contents was one of my favorites from the class.
• Virtual Dice and Coin Flip was an extension that I largely enjoyed for its execution. Its presentation was quite aesthetically pleasing with the pulsing colors and the beautiful made-in-CSS assets for the die and coin; frankly, I’m flabberghasted that it’s even possible to make something like that, the die especially, in CSS.