week 4 blog post

_posts/2024-02-18-week04.md

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+title: "Week 4: Browser Extension Completion"
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+Working on this browser extension with my group has been an interesting experience, and an informative one. I initially came into the project with a lack of confidence in my ability to contribute code-wise, since I consider myself very much a beginner at JavaScript. I intended to work mainly on adding documentation, focusing on the open source aspect of the project rather than its functionality. However, our group ended up running into some problems making our extension work, mainly that the extension only worked when its popup was open, so I tried to help with debugging. I ended up reading up on Mozilla's web docs more and learned a lot about how browser extensions work with its different types of files, as well as learning more about JavaScript, and I was ultimately able to push a fix to solve our group's issue, which was very satisfying. I also learned a lot about using Git to work on a collaborative project with others. Our group tried to stick to the practice of using different branches and making pull requests to keep our changes from conflicting, and so working on this project was actually my first time making a pull request, and has overall taught me a lot more about collaborative coding.
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+It's been fun trying out the other teams' extensions as well. I think it's interesting how many of them involve helping with productivity, which I think makes sense being a main priority or issue that students have. My favorites might be Insult Reminders and FocusPal, both of which were productivity-focused extensions. I liked the humorous approach to Insult Reminders, and I think it could genuinely be helpful to me in being more productive. I also think FocusPal could be really useful to me, to keep my impulse control and self-restraint in check. I like how both extensions take a sort of "fighting your own brain" approach to productivity, which is often how I approach productivity in my own life.