Vishy tech notes

MozillaTN SNSCT WebExtension Workshop

VISWAPRASATH KS's photo
VISWAPRASATH KS
·

3 min read

Coimbatore is one of the amazing city in Tamilnadu, and its so special for MozillaTN community as we have more amazing student contributors. SNSCT college at Coimbatore is so special and is best known for QA activities.

This time in SNSCT we are organising our first WebExtension session. For this session Makilan came from his home town and I joined from Chennai. The day started very early at Coimbatore. The college is in remote area, the surroundings looks beautiful with amazing green field. So we started our session at 10 AM, some of the faces are very well known as most of them came to MozillaTN meetup 2017. First Makilan started with the Getting Started with Mozilla Community, and he was joined by some of the other contributors who shared their experience of learning in Mozilla community.

  • Makilan gave introduction of all areas in general and Localization.
  • Surentharan gave about QA
  • Nagarajan gave about WebCompat
  • Rajesh about Rust.

Then I started about the general introduction about WebExtension, how this is going to change Firefox and importance of this bootcamp session at this time. After we learned general introduction about WebExtension we went for lunch. In the mean time lab assistants were working to fix Internet issue.

In the afternoon session we started discussing about the code flow of various add-ons developed by me. Some of the add-ons discussed are as follows.

Then we started brain stroming the ideas which we are going to work for the second day. That was interesting to see many students came up with proper ideas to work. Some ideas I loved as shared below.

  • Tab Close using browser Action.
  • Social Share buttons.
  • current page URL shorterner
  • One click Google account logout
  • Blocking some domains
  • Erasing History

Then we took our group photo

SNSCT Hack Group Pic

Then in the evening, in spite of being tired, organisers along with myself and Makilan went around the city. A new mall has been opened and we had a visit and enjoyed the place. And we all had dinner (unlimited briyani).

Then in the second day, students started coming to coding session at 9:30 AM. Some of the students had very minimal JS skills and started their coding. By afternoon two of the seconds started uploading their code to AMO.

  • Sriram developed an add where we can logout from all our Google accounts. Find it in AMO. The API he used is browserAction.onClick and tabs.create.

  • Nagaraja Naidu developed an add-on for shorterning the current page URL. Find it in AMO . He used browserAction UI and tabs API.

  • Krithika showed partial demo of listing the current active tabs and closing them.

On Second day we finished our session around 2PM.

What I loved

  • Students were able to think of add-ons idea and build with little help.
  • Students were eager to learn more, with dedicated trainer they can become professional developers.

Problems faced

  • Internet connectivity was not proper we had problem.

Compartively its better session. Hope to see more contributors from this college with respect to AMO. Love to have #SNSCTHack again next year.