Our Progress

This week, my team and I worked together to (a) learn the basics of building a Google Chrome browser extension, (b) gain familiarity with existing open-source Chrome extensions, and (c) brainstorm ideas for our own extension. Although I use many extensions regularly, I’d never gone through the process of building one myself, so I appreciated working alongside my team to understand the basics with a simple “Hello Extensions” project.

I also loved exploring what Chrome extensions already exist because there are so many more than I had imagined. I even learned that Ghostery, my favorite ad blocker, is an open source extension.

After reviewing what is already on the market and discussing our own interests, we decided on an extension named affirmME. As of now, affirmME analyzes a user’s current webpage and makes an LLM call to generate a tailored affirmation. For example, if you’re cramming for a final at the last minute and need a confidence boost before an exam, affirmME is designed to provide exactly that kind of encouragement.

I feel great about our progress so far and how we are working together as a team. We’ve done a good job meeting each other in the middle and blending our individual interests and skill sets. I’m surprised how much more excited I am to learn new skills and tackle an intimidating project when I am not doing it alone, especially because I consider myself fairly independent.

Next Steps

We haven’t run into many issues yet, but our next step is to regroup and map out our development process in more detail. We anticipate that testing may be challenging, since it requires 16 GB of RAM, so we want to be proactive.

I plan to contribute by working on how we extract data from a webpage (title, URL, and text content) and how we preprocess that data for the LLM call (stripping PII and summarizing content for prompt input). I also plan to help with necessary documentation for our project to be properly open source.