Development

My hobby projects are small Chrome extensions and little single-purpose websites. One of those extensions, PDF to PNG, unexpectedly climbed to first place in Chrome Web Store searches for “pdf to png” (well, most of the time), and nearly 500 people use it - which is amazing! Once PDF to images worked, I immediately wanted to do the reverse - images -> PDF, only better: right-click an image on any page, have an easy(!) way to adjust the settings, and do everything locally in the browser without uploading the images anywhere! I put all those lovely settings in the side panel. Except a regular user might never think to open it, and I did want them to know it was there, without pestering people who were happy with the right-click menu. So I’d show it sometimes (or until the user actually clicked something in the panel). Then I ran into a Chrome rule: you can only open the panel in response to a click, which, in a menu item click handler, means before the first await. And to show it sometimes, the extension needs to remember on each click how many times it has already shown it - but reading that from storage takes an await. The solution - store the counter right in the context menu item’s id! :) And here it is - Save Image as PDF. Right-click - and your image is already a PDF. Your browser does not support the video tag. ...

I constantly have multiple Chrome windows open, each with a pile of tabs. One window has a dozen slow analytics queries that I’ll check “any minute now.” Another has my research on $lookup and $unwind in MongoDB. The third one — with the most tabs — has St. Petersburg school enrollment rules, because life. Of course, a more urgent task comes up, and the old windows get closed… only for me to resume researching the same topics a week later, unable to remember where I left off. Tab-saving extensions have existed for ages, but reviews regularly complain about data loss — so why not build my own, designed specifically for backup? Every Chrome user already has a Google account, usually with sync enabled. What if I just saved tabs there — no signups, no servers, no subscriptions? Your browser does not support the video tag. The result is Tab Saver. One click — all tabs saved and backed up to your Google account. ...