Prior to February 3rd, I had no idea what was involved when creating a browser extension. As of February 12th my team and I have developed a simple, but fully functional Firefox browser extension. One of the best things about being a developer is how fast you can see a project through with an abundance of resources both online and in my case, offline with my team members. I do not have a strong Javascript background but I was able to finish the project both through online tutorials and relying on my team members to help with parts I did not have much experience with.

To give a bit of context our project was a simple coin flip and dice roll simulator (see below). Here is a link to our project’s repository if you would like to make any contributions.

Our Project

I am very proud of what we were able to create, but more importantly I was really proud of myself for being able to work in a group and feel like I contributed enough. Often times in a technical group project, or group projects in general I feel like the work is never dispersed evenly and at least one member is dissatisfied with the end product. I had a positive group experience because we were able to take the project apart piece by piece and turn those pieces into actionable tasks that we then delegated to ourselves evenly and fairly.

Prior to this project I always used terminal to push my changes to Github, but I decided to start using the GUI Github Desktop. While I do think it is important to learn the right git terminal commands, using Github Desktop made the process so much simpler. I was able to visualize the exact changes I made, and select what changes I then wanted to commit and push. I think I will definitely be using this tool more often from now on.

Aside from learning about new tools I also learned about new ways to collaborate effectively. I learned that I am very vocal when it comes to working in groups, and I expect that from my team members. Using slack definitely forced myself and my peers to communicate, especially with the live logs. Keeping live logs allowed us to keep track of what tasks were left and what tasks we already completed. Going forward I definitely want to continue using live logs to track the progress of different projects I am working on with others.