Day 248: Teaching What I Know

Today I saw a post on HN on a Chrome extension educational product, and of course, I shared the extension starter kit I made a way back. People in the thread appreciated it, and I’ll occasionally have a friend message me saying that they’re using the starter kit.

The starter kit is already useful because it takes care of all the boring, painful configuration work involved in hooking up a new app, but it can also be greatly improved. With my experience building Hide Likes, Hide Feed, Intention, and now Browserflow, I’ve identified patterns that are useful for every extension, and I’d like to incoporate them into the starter kit. One example is allowing for easy data syncing between different contexts in the extension (background, content scripts, and popup) using either Redux or the custom hooks that I’d previously written.

Whenever I decide to take a break from building products, I’d love to spend time building out the extension starter kit and writing blog posts to help people understand how everything works and best practices. For example, I painstakingly figured out a way to get the proper permissions to inject content scripts without having to request the user’s browsing history, but it’s extremely nonobvious. I’d love for other extension developers to adopt more privacy-forward and secure practices, and providing a starter kit with all of that built-in would make it much easier for them to do so.

So many things I want to work on! I haven’t even created accounts or paid plans for Intention yet! Or made a mobile version like I’ve talked about forever! I haven’t even shipped Browserflow! I wish I could clone myself. Is the answer to to bring people on to work on this stuff with me?