Overview

This week, we finished and presented our browser extensions and went over git in lecture.

Git Exercises

I’m unsure whether I should have capitalized git in this section heading, but it looks weird when I try the other way. “git Exercises”. Lowercase first word of title, uppercase next word. It bothers me.

I’m already fairly familiar with git from various classes and from my work as a computational biology research assistant, but the git lecture covered some git functionalities that I’d never really tried before, which was pretty cool. I haven’t had occasion to use git reflog, git cat-file, or git restore before, and I’m now on the lookout for chances to incorporate them into my workflow.

Browser Extensions

Virtual Pet Game

Our completed browser extension was more of a traditional virtual pet sim - it could be hungry, happy, or too full. The user can also switch between a cat and a panda, and there’s a cute little feature where your cursor turns into a food item when hovering over the “Feed Pet” button.

Other Projects

I really enjoyed seeing what other people did with this project. I found the autoscroller to be pretty funny, as well as the I Did That extension - I’ve mentioned it to a few people outside of the class since then, and they were pretty tickled too. Quick Notes was quite impressive for such a short amount of time, and it seems like a very useful tool.

Takeaways

Trying to coordinate a project between team members is, of course, challenging. People have other work to do, and internal soft deadlines are easy to let pass. It’s also hard to balance everyone’s different skillsets and knowledge levels. We had some git and GitHub challenges that resulted, at one point, in force pushing another branch to main because the original main was hopelessly mangled. (This resulted in us losing CONTRIBUTING.md, which was only recovered because one team member still had it in a fork.) Patience and flexibility were key.

An Aside on the No Code of Conduct

I admit I wasn’t very impressed with this. Everybody knows that toxic environments exist, that toxicity is bad for teamwork (not to mention the toll it takes on people stuck in that environment), and that on the Internet, that kind of toxicity will fester anywhere it’s permitted. The quote, “You can say ‘all are welcome’, but if wolves and sheep are both welcome then you’re only going to get wolves,” comes to mind. I, for one, am not going to risk getting my good mood ruined just to add some measly feature to some random project - and for free! Reading the No Code makes it clear that the creators had a very specific axe to grind, one that may have seemed less juvenile in 2015 when they wrote it. As for putting it in your own project, 10 years later…

Contributions

I submitted a fix to the class website GitHub. It’s time I branched out to other projects.