This week was truly remarkable! Firstly, I was quoted by none other than Kent Beck in his Tidy First newsletter. Mr. Beck is the pioneer behind Extreme Programming and the muse behind Martin Fowler's "Refactoring," which are two of my top reads on programming.
Equally exciting: my browser extension is almost at the finish line! In fact, you can test it now if you want. Just reach out!
A touch of flair
The extension used to look like 💩💩💩
But now it looks like ✨✨✨
For styling, I went with Chakra UI, a very opinionated styling framework used on the Udacity and Ethereum websites. When it comes to styling, you usually have a few decisions to make:
Do you want to create a design system?
How much customization do you need?
Do you need help with interactive elements like modals and popovers?
At one end of the spectrum, you create your own CSS structure. This is like building a shadow project next to your React app: much like you should ensure code quality in your JavaScript and HTML files, you will also need to ensure your CSS code is also tight, otherwise maintaining it will be a nightmare.
Then you have stuff like Tailwind CSS, that allows you to create your own design system while ensuring some standards are followed.
Finally, at the other end of the spectrum, you make no styling choices. All you want is for the app to look good and the framework does the rest. Chakra UI falls into this category. This was our choice. Additionally, Chakra includes components for "toasts," which are brief informational messages that apps occasionally display at the bottom of the screen and disappear after a few seconds. I was previously using react-hot-toast for this, but now I replaced it with Chakra. Encountered a few bugs in the process, but my tests managed to catch them all! Gotta love them tests.
Opening the gates
Something has been bothering me. As I mentioned when I started this project, my goal was to create a simple browser extension for learning purposes. Mission accomplished. But while looking for alternative products, I was surprised how many copycats LLM clients there are… and how much they are charging users!
Let's face it, this is a soon-to-be feature of every browser. I'm aware of it, you are aware of it, and so are they. However, some users may not be, and it seems they're being exploited for as much as possible before they discover they're paying for something that's already included in their browsers.
So, in a grand and potentially empty gesture of rebellion, I've thrown my extension into the open-source ring! Check it out: https://github.com/MrCordeiro/barra-ai
Take that, profiteers!