Through an extaordinary turn of events, I was able to absolutely jam through the first part of this app. It’s pretty exciting and I have a few thoughts on how I was able to execute that, but it may have to wait for another post. Here we’ll focus on the technical aspects of what I’ve accomplished so far. let's get started Technical Decisions In my previous post I listed the following features required for the MVP:

Back when I was still super pregnant I attended a fun, informal working meetup with some old colleagues of mine. Despite having made no progress on any particular project and feeling as if I had nothing to contribute, everybody was super supportive of my needs and feelings, and asked me a lot of kind questions. Yeah, they’re that kind of awesome folks. While I did hear some of the classic “you just gotta make time” input, they also struck down a mental block I’d been having: the idea that if you’re going to create something, it must be creative, new, and unique.

The Journey So Far I’m building a web app/Chrome extension pair that allows your bookmarks to “decay” (grow old and disappear) over time; the intention is to encourage you to actually read those tabs you have open as opposed to letting them linger until your browser crashes. The app is built, data displayed, bookmarks properly styled with decaying animations, so now I’m adding additional data interaction and the ability to set the decay rate.

While the docs for creating a Chrome extension are really quite good, I initially struggled to figure out the right way for my extension to communicate with a webapp (specifically: sending a request for data from the webapp to an extension and receiving a response). There can be a lot to read, and with extension changes from Manifest v2 to v3 some docs can be a bit misleading as well. I thought I’d distill my knowledge on this to a simple tutorial and hopefully make this easier for anybody out there who needs it.

The Journey So Far I’m building a web app/Chrome extension pair that allows your bookmarks to “decay” (grow old and disappear) over time; the intention is to encourage you to actually read those tabs you have open as opposed to letting them linger until your browser crashes. The basic core of the webapp is done (data fetched and displayed, simply), so now it’s time to apply some styles to visually identify decaying bookmarks.