We wanted to create a chrome extension that could make a real difference for people around the world, and because we believed that procrastination is a important problem in modern society, we wanted to create an app to help with that
This is an chrome extension that first takes in credit card information, and then tracks the amount of time you take when you visit off-topic websites such as Facebook or Youtube. Based on the amount of time you spend there, it will donate money from your account to a charity of your choosing. This chrome extension is built in React.js for the front end and backed by a python script that does the rest.
However, not everything was happy and bright, we ran into a great number problems during production. We would say that the most major one was our failure to integrate our product with the Solace Pubsub system. We spend countless hours trying to figure it out, but in the end, due to the security settings of chrome extensions, there was no way to connect to the solace cloud. We were not able to succeed in this respect, however we found other workarounds to successfully continue working on the project.
Even with those challenges, we persevered and completed our project. We are most proud of the fact that, even though our original idea with Solace did not work, we were still able to finish on time and create a project we can all be proud of.
From this project, we have learned that sometimes, there is no way to solve a problem and one will sometimes have to take another path. In this case, Solace's cloud system refused to work with chrome extensions and we were forced to come up with another solution to integrate back end and front end together. Nonetheless, we learned a great deal from our struggles about how web-servers and web-sockets work as well as many new techniques for front end development.
There are still a number of features that were impossible to implement due to the time constraints, such as a better back end to front end connection system, or a more secure payment system, which is why if we were to take the product into the future, our main concerns will be greater functionality and security.
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