I haven’t written - or programmed - anything since last October…yikes. When was the last time you went that long without touching your keyboard? 😬 In fact, today is the first day since my last post (again, last October) that I’ve even sat down in my home office to do more than vaccum dust bunnies. It’s wild, you know? I used to sit at this desk every day, from 7:30am through 4pm, like clockwork, like a truly driven, hardworking maniac.

I friend recently pointed out to me that it’s been 1 year since I left my job. I hadn’t been paying particularly close attention, largely because it (apparently) wasn’t very important to me. But having someone congratulate me on it made me sit back and think about it a bit. After choosing to leave a job that burt me down to a withered stump (or, you could say, I allowed to burn me down to a withered stump), let’s have a retrospective, shall we?

The Journey So Far I’m building a web app/Chrome extension pair that allows your bookmarks to “decay” (grow old and disappear) over time; the intention is to encourage you to actually read those tabs you have open as opposed to letting them linger until your browser crashes. The app is built, data displayed, bookmarks properly styled with decaying animations, so now I’m adding additional data interaction and the ability to set the decay rate.

While the docs for creating a Chrome extension are really quite good, I initially struggled to figure out the right way for my extension to communicate with a webapp (specifically: sending a request for data from the webapp to an extension and receiving a response). There can be a lot to read, and with extension changes from Manifest v2 to v3 some docs can be a bit misleading as well. I thought I’d distill my knowledge on this to a simple tutorial and hopefully make this easier for anybody out there who needs it.

The Journey So Far I’m building a web app/Chrome extension pair that allows your bookmarks to “decay” (grow old and disappear) over time; the intention is to encourage you to actually read those tabs you have open as opposed to letting them linger until your browser crashes. The basic core of the webapp is done (data fetched and displayed, simply), so now it’s time to apply some styles to visually identify decaying bookmarks.