Both of my partners are very talented and were constantly updating/working on the extension. At first the extension seemed like it would have a pretty simple implementation, however very quickly an issue we ran into was figuring out how/where to store the urls that the user decides to block. There is javascript code to add url’s to local storage, but I believe there was some issue where this list of blocke websites would get erased somewhere in the code before the actual block check occured or the code did not add the urls to the list correctly in the first place, meaning that either way the web extension was not actually blocking any urls. I definitely feel like I made the easiest contributions, but it’s good to know that there usually exists small but necessary tasks that need to be done. In my case it was making 2 icons, and a redirect page. I attempted to write the redirect code in the javascript script, however I ran into problems with the concept of javascript promises and asynchronous inputs and what not, so in the end I really did not contribute too much but I still got something in which I’m glad for. Both of my partners killed it with the end result. It took a lot of work, the code was not working up until the presentation we did in class. Literally minutes before class started, one of my partners figured out how to solve the issue with url storage.

I learned that I need to check my emails and slack more often, while both of my partners were shooting updates at eachother I didn’t even realize that we had started. By the time I started working on the project, the entire ui and the basic idea behind the javascript script was already programmed. So definitely need to improve my communication with partners. I also realized that it’s pretty important to be able to understand code written by other people, in this case my partner’s javascript code while I was trying to set up the automatic redirect, which ultimately I did not figure out, but overall this experience was a good lesson in reading and understanding code so thats ok!

In terms of web design, I relearned a few basics, including being able to read/understand javascript, and write a very small amount of css and html. This is the first time I’ve ever experienced an iterative style of contributions by multiple group members. I am much better at sitting down with my groupmembers in person or getting on a discord call with them so that we can discuss and work on exactly the parts we have partitioned for eachother to do. So, I think it would be valuable to learn how to just step up and start coding away without full communications.

There were so many novel ideas that the other groups created, and all of them had polish or humor as an aspect of their extensions. Some of them I might even use, such as the dice roll/coin toss extension which is very well done. It’s really interesting to see what can be done with javascript because I personally have never worked with it before, and at this point it seems very powerful. For instance the font replacer extension needed to brute force what fonts are available to one’s computer, and I believe this was done in javascript, so honestly I’m thinking learning some javascript will be extremely helpful.