What Happened Today?

Saturday, January 23, 2021.

Today we launched our LinkedIn feed blocker. Well, sort of. At the moment, it’s up to Google. Let me explain. We planned to make the chrome extension we developed last week available on the chrome store for the public to download. So that’s what we started working on.

Before actually trying to launch the extension, we spent some time working on setting up our git repository to enable easier collaboration and version control. That should have been a quick activity but we got held back a little due to some details with git hub’s ‘master’ and ‘main’ terminologies as well as some other steps in the sequence of activities for github. It eventually turned fine and we got it all working as expected. A small win. We’ll take it.

Okay, so moving on the extension launch. As we started looking into how to get our product on to the store, we realized there were quite a few things we had to get done properly. For example, an icon. We did not think much about making an icon because we thought we could deal with that problem at a later time. Turns out that was not the case. Google requires an icon before an extension can be submitted. It makes sense. So we tried doing one quickly through an online icon maker, but that did not work as expected, so we made a really quick one using Figma. Let’s just say, it allowed us to check that box off. The quality of the icon, that is a later problem. Okay, so we got the icon out of the way.

Now we needed at least a screenshot or a video. All these requirements make sense but we just were not so prepared to deal with them properly at the moment given our goal to get something out. So we took a screenshot of a portion of the LinkedIn homepage showing the blocked feed. We adjusted the size image using figma and that got the job done. Again, as for the quality of the screenshot, that is a later problem.

Finally, we entered in a few details that were required and that was it. We submitted the extension for Google’s review. Given the effort we put into meeting the requirements, we would be pleasantly surprised if our extension gets approved to the chrome store. However, we went through the process today and by this time next week we should know the state of our submission.

Regardless, we learnt about the process and will spend next week trying to improve our work.