It serves web pages, performs validation & error handling on inputs and executes business logic. It is the back end of the application while the web pages served comprise the front end.
When I first consider developing a new application to solve a problem, I’ll mentally model how it works.
What does the user experience look like? How do I convey the work flow in a way that is immediately apparent to someone who has never seen this before?
To anyone reading this site for the first time, welcome. For everyone else, welcome back.
I’d taken a break from writing long-form pieces for quite a while… for lots of reasons, mostly because I didn’t feel like writing. Inspiration didn’t seem to occur as easily. No big mystery.
As I move away from the toxic environment where I’d done a lot of short form writing - ahem - I’ve relaunched my site here.
In March of 2020, I was working on a new service that I expected to release within days. The pandemic emerged, lockdown was implemented and that plan was suddenly irrelevant.
No one would be needing an expense tracker - one that takes photos of receipts captured on your phone & generates printable expense reports - any time soon. “Physical receipt”? Ewww, no thanks.
Well, more than a year & many vaccinations later… we may be emerging from the pandemic.
This is a fully documented & tested implementation of a cross-browser extension that locates a domain-specific cookie, using the messaging API common to both Chrome + Firefox to inject that cookie’s value into the DOM of the page in the active tab.
The code has embedded documentation that explains the overall purpose of the extension, the logic of code blocks and the interaction between the extension’s files.
I hope you enjoy it.