Browser Extension Reflection

The Browser extension project was a pretty insightful expereince for me. The premise of the project was pretty simple: to create a Mozzila Firefox extension with a group, as well as make it an open source project. One thing it made me be aware of was the importance of liscencing. The importance of paying attention to the liscence attached to the sources you use, whether it’s code, or some clipart you used, is very important and I did not consider that before. I really enjoyed working with my teammates Sam and Glenda, and it was also great to get to know them more. I would say we worked very well together. We were all very agreeable, and did the work we all agreed on doing with no issues. I made the non-code documents that are important to every open source project, such as the ReadMe, Contributing, Liscence, and Code of Conduct markdown files. I also fixed some bugs in the .js extension code, and used some git skills I learned in class.

One of the more useful things I learned was how to work on a coding project with others using git and github. Prior to this project, I used to only use git for my personal use, so I only needed to add, commit, and push. When I did group work in the past, we would never work on the same thing at once, and made it very clear which files to touch and which files to leave alone, and when we were working on the project to avoid merge conflicts due to our lack of understanding in git. In this project, I learned about creating different branches, submitting and merging pull requests, and working on a group project using git the “correct” way.

Other Teams

Looking at the other teams, it made me realise that the potential for this project was a lot higher. My approach going into it was to make a simple web extension, using the basics of the Mozilla documentation we learned about, and learn about making it an open source proejct. However, looking at the other projects, especially TikTock, really inspired me. They made a product that was very refined, and even published it to the Mozilla store, which is super cool, and they really took it to the next level.