This week, I ended up getting grouped into a project team to build a simple Firefox extension. This involved a little bit of a crash course on creating both a simple and a more complicated browser extension, which was relatively easy to learn (in terms of basically the framework of the extensions), as well as refreshing my basic JS skills (as they haven’t really been used since 2023, but it was all good since the fundamentals of JS for browsers was relatively simple).

Ultimately, the project team was built such that there would be a balance of people who were shaky in Git and people who were shaky in JS (but not both, although I can’t say that about other groups). We were tasked with creating and ultimately pitching a Firefox extension for February 12, 2025. We didn’t really have much of an idea of how to make the web more useful, but we did have an idea about how to roast the people in the White House at this moment. I was kind of inspired by all those “I did that!” stickers that basically spread throughout American gas stations like crazy back in 2021-2022, when the inflation was kinda really bad and people kept on blaming Former President Biden for it.

Yes, that I did that sticker. Whoisjohngalt, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

With all the self destruction of true American values in the White House as of late, why wouldn’t we want to return the favor on Trump with a browser extension that targeted certain government websites? And so, with my idea pitched, and my fellow group members agreeing with the idea, I needed to run through one more check with my professor. I didn’t know what to expect, since I was worried that the idea would be too political and that the idea would be banned. However, we were given the green light, and we were off to the races.

To facilitate the group work process and to properly submit our work, we created a GitHub repository that would contain all the files for the project. We then figured out how we were going to load this satirical work into the right websites. We decided that we were to start, load it on the White House website (even though Trump already did it on the website, but his version feels super triumphant and not poking enough fun at how horrible he is). We were able to implement the functionality of the Trump moving on the bottom screen relatively quickly, as it was just some DOM manipulation, as well as implementing a feature where Trump could be dragged.

I had one of the more annoying tasks for this project. Since this project had to be open source, we had to play it safe with which picture we could use for the Trump picture that we are using in the extension. This was a topic of interest on Wednesday in the context of our blogs, but it will probably cover anything else as well. I ended up being the one to source an image of Trump that we could use (which means anything that was covered under the Creative Commons or was in public domain), and reading through legal texts to see what legal disclaimers or things I would have to do if I used an image for our extension. Then I had to edit out the background of the Trump image and edit in a text saying “I did that!” (Just like the Biden picture.) Finding the matching font for the “I did that!” was relatively straightforward (as I could just use a website that matches whatever text is on the image with potential font matches), but I had to be careful with how different fonts are licensed. Sadly, I found out that the original font used on the Joe Biden sticker had licensing restrictions that prevented us from using it in our project, so I had to find a lookalike font, which was a bit of a pain to find because I don’t really have all of the vocabulary to describe the different features of the font. So that was fun. I was eventually able to find a lookalike font and use it on the image.

It was kinda interesting to see how our project team worked out. Normally on teams I’m on, there’s always some sort of person who has faded away from everything and there’s always someone who’s always so on top of things that they encroach on other people’s tasks, but this time around, the group kind of felt balanced, with everyone contributing equally. I guess this is because we were really open to just seeing where this project went and didn’t really have that many specific goals in mind for this extension, and I really hope that this right mix of not overcommiting ourselves, plus everyone being motivated for this common goals, kind of carries over to future projects (both in this class, in other classes, and beyond). (I think this is kinda helped by the fact that there was no dominating person in this project–maybe I’m the problem when it comes to bad group dynamics sometimes by dominating too much and putting too much pressure on others?)

I am a bit nervous about the presentation, but I feel like I really found the dream team with this project.