As mentioned in my previous blog post, my group and I were able to finish our extension project within two sittings. Both of these sittings were during the week 2/3-2/9, and so not much work was done this week on our browser extension. The only edits we made included double checking the license we were using, fixing typos in the text files, and crediting sources. None of these changes required too much time, so all of the work was done on our own times. Communication of these changes were done through text messaging.

Working on this browser extension project as a group was quite an enjoyable experience. My group members and I all got along really well and we definitely all learned a lot from the process. I definitely got a better understanding of how a group project should be done. It requires chemistry between the group members and equal distribution of work among all members(unless someone willingly wants more). There’s also a lot of communication involved outside of the time you are working together with your group members. Just scheduling a time to meet where every one is available is often an issue and it takes a lot of planning ahead of time to find something that works for every one. In any case, communication is key because every one should be on the same page.

Besides learning how to correctly collaborate with group members, I learned a lot about version control. When I worked on my own projects previously, I didn’t utilize the Git Bash terminal or any type of version control other than saving the files on my computer and uploading them to Github when the project was finished. But after this week I now recognize the value Git has in maintaining an organized history of changes, so one doesn’t have to keep a bunch of tabs open of different changes themselves. It also lets other collaborators see changes without having to ask you personally, which is very useful and more accurate than a verbal retell. I learned about all the commands behind Git such as pushing, pulling, checking out, and etc. I will definitely continue to use Git and version control in general in the future now that I have a better understanding behind it.

Wednesday’s in-class presentations were a really enjoyable experience. It was awesome to see what ideas other groups came up with for extensions, and all of them either had a humorous twist or practical use to them. My favorite extension(outside of my group’s) was the study buddy extension. While I loved the humorous extensions like MockBob which changed the text to look like the text of a popular internet trend, study buddy really resonated practicality to me. As a college student, I definitely feel overwhelmed by social media sometimes to the point of copious procrastination, but the idea of being able to block out all distractions and force you to focus on the task at hand is very handy. It’ll definitely mitigate the procrastination I face when trying to be productive, and I can see it being an extension many people use in their day to day lives.