Build Your Own Chrome Extension

This challenge is to build your own Chrome extension. Chrome extensions are a software programs that extends the functionality of the Google Chrome web browser. They are typically written in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and they modify or enhance the browser’s functionality in some way.

Chrome extensions can add new features, customise the appearance of websites, improve productivity, block ads, manage passwords, and much more. You can install and manage Chrome extensions through the Chrome Web Store.

The Challenge - Building A Chrome Extension

For this Coding Challenge you’re going to build a Chrome extension that will customise the look and functionality of each new tab you open in Chrome. It’s drawing on inspiration from the popular extension Bonjourr and the more complicated Momentum.

If you’ve never built a Chrome extension before the Chrome for Developer website has a section on getting started building Chrome extensions.

Step Zero

Before we begin, please set up your IDE etc. as you like it. This challenge is one you’ll be tackling in JavaScript or TypeScript along with HTML and CSS.

Step 1

In this step your goal is to create the Coding Challenges equivalent to ‘Hello, World’ for Chrome extensions. That is create an extension that:

1. You can install locally
2. Sets the background colour of the new tab to Coding Challenges Blue (that’s #04295B)
3. Displays the text Coding Challenges>_ in the centre of the new tab. Bonus points for matching the Coding Challenges branding! 😀

When you create a new tab, the tab should then look like this:

Step 2

In this step your goal is to add the current time to the tab, and the date in a human friendly format below. You can draw your inspiration from Bonjourr or my example below:

Don’t forget to include the functionality to update the time!

Step 3 - Version 1

In this step your goal is to add some dynamic information. For example, Bonjourr provides details of the weather.

We’re doing Coding Challenges so we’ll list the latest coding challenges from the Coding Challenges Substack Feed. So, at the time of writing that looks like this:

To do this you’ll have to ensure the extension has permission to fetch from Substack. To further complicate things, at the time of writing the Substack RSS feed does’t include CORS headers so you’ll need to find a way to fetch the feed through some sort of proxy. If you haven’t come across it before, you can learn more about CORS here.

Step 3 - Version 2

In this alternate step your goal is to add some dynamic information without the need for a proxy. As the Coding Challenges Community is doing a great job of sharing solutions I decided to create a version that displays all the open PRs for the Shared Solutions Github Repository. That looks like this:

You can get a list of the PRs by calling Github’s REST API endpoint: https://api.github.com/repos/CodingChallegesFYI/SharedSolutions/pulls you’ll find the full documentation for their REST API here.

Going Further

You can take this Coding Challenge further by extracting further information from either of the dynamic elements and adding some more context. For example, for the Substack feed you could add the images, title and description of each challenge.

After that, you could change the extension to be more generic, perhaps displaying a daily quote and offering a customisable Github feed. Then consider packaging the extension and making it available on the Chrome Web Store.

Share Your Solutions!

If you think your solution is an example of the developers can learn from please share it, put it on GitHub, GitLab or elsewhere. Then let me know via Twitter or LinkedIn or just post about it there and tag me.

Request for Feedback

I’m writing these challenges to help you develop your skills as a software engineer based on how I’ve approached my own personal learning and development. What works for me, might not be the best way for you - so if you have suggestions for how I can make these challenges more useful to you and others, please get in touch and let me know. All feedback greatly appreciated.

You can reach me on Twitter, LinkedIn or through SubStack

Thanks and happy coding!

John

Help Others by Sharing Your Solutions!

If you think your solution is an example other developers can learn from please share it, put it on GitHub, GitLab or elsewhere. Then let me know - ping me a message on the Discord Server or in the Coding Challenges Sub Reddit, via Twitter or LinkedIn or just post about it there and tag me.

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