I’ve been looking for the most proactive approach to deepen my proficiency in Java Script, so I figured the best way would be to build a tool to solve for a personal problem.

Problem: I’ve always had students who’ve had to leave the session before time, especially for weekend cohorts and usually around ~10 min before time. When this happens, I’d be caught in the middle of a rock and a hard place: To show exit ticket for everyone & disrupt session flow or just say bye to this one student? All the times, it’s been the latter—bye to just one student. This dilemma is amplified if you’re dealing with >12 students.

Solution: So I wanted have my own cake and eat it, or at least a majority of it: Preserve session flow (…cake) and get to send the exit ticket the one or two students seamlessly (…and have it).

I spent two weekends digging into Google’s chrome API documentation, and built a chrome extension from ground up. Fotunately or unfortunately, I spent 50% of my time solving for some rookie errors. It was a test of character. My initial plan was to have a back-end side that would run a background.js script to grab the exit ticket by sniffing the exit ticket from the “show summary” button but I figured I could simply run everything from the front-end (contentScript.js) since I could teach my chrome extension AV’s logic for generating exit tickets.

A few lessons I’m learning, which I’ll continue to add here:

  • Prioritize function; users prob. don’t care how fancy your app looks, provided it works. (cluncky UI, but working. Still work in progress.)
  • Your users don’t exlusively use dark mode. (icon was barely visible for light mode users—fixed.)
  • Your users prob don’t share your sense of humor. (almost funny ‘rick roll’ video for error page—fixed with cleaner error page with trouble-shooting options.)
  • The more permissions you request for your app, the more time it takes to review. (requested useless permissions, 50% fixed.)
  • Seek less validation, just build :)

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