Extension Reflection

Working along two other groupmates on this extension project was a good experience with few complications and mainly straightfoward. I enjoyed how my group was able to immediately on the idea of the extension and how to split up the work. As the project progressed and some parts of our original plan had to alter, there was no trouble in deciding the changes. I have worked in very few group coding projects before but in this project I learned how important it is to initiate communication as soon as you need. In previous group work, I waited too long to ask urgent question and also bring up important discussion to move the project. I was able to work on the code of the project without confusion due to the clear line of communication and immediate response from my groupmembers.

My Contributions

Initially, I contributed the starting code of the extension and passed it on to one of my groupmembers who contributed the main bulk of code that created our Firefox extension. However, there was an issue with our extension and another groupmember provided a fix. From that point, I was able to build off their previous contributions and add a feature to reset the stats that our extension was tracking. Additionally, there was an error with how our extension was tracking time as it was only tracking once the extension icon was clicked on. I only wish that I contributed more to the documentation aspect of our project as that is an area that I am lacking experience in.

My Contributions

I considered myself experienced in Javascript but most of the coding I have done was using Express.js or React. I have worked with client-side Javascript when I first learned JS but I have not had any recent experience with it. When I first began the extension project I was unaware on the best way to approach this project. I utilized the Mozilla web docs to help me with the starter code. When I implemented my features and bug fixes to the project, it was daunting at first to try to understand the all the different intertwined parts. With help from my groupmembers and online resources, I was able to implement the reset button. For the time tracking fix, I had to do more research but I also learned how use an eventlistener on runtime to listen for messages coming from other parts of the extension. It was new to me but I found it to be very useful.

My Top Picks

I think that the most entertaining project and presentation came from the StudyTool Team. It was a unique idea and they worked very well together when displaying their extension. However, I think the best extension in terms of something that I would actually use would be WebPad. Although it is a simple idea, I could see myself using this extension to boost my productivity. The ability to take notes directly on the webpage instead of using an outside application would save time and help with organization. I like to keep my computer uncluttered and I also find myself needing to take small notes or a place to past a copied link for later. I would only add few features to this extension including being able to save multiple notes per page and having a sidebar to view and delete all notes.