Overview
The Learning Management System used by my university is problematic in 2
main ways: it’s difficult to download course materials (too many clicks to
get to the download pages, and you can only download individual files), and
it looks very old (modern websites tend to favour cleaner designs). I was
frustrated by these two pain points, so I made
a chrome extension that allows for one-click recursive downloads of course
materials, and makes the LMS look (objectively, in my opinion) better.
My Contribution
I developed the entire extension on my own, and self-initiated the
project. It was pretty successful, in my opinion (over 20% of my
university's undergraduates use it
almost daily). It
had neither had nor needed any official backing
Software Challenge
The styling was simple. I just wanted a shift to a flatter, more
minimalist design from the older, skeuomorphic-ish one. The main challenge was the recursive download
functionality, which would download all files found in folders and
all subsequent subfolders. I made AJAX requests to extract all relevant
information from further pages, while maintaining the user's current page.
Also, due to limitations imposed by the Chrome Extensions API, I had to
resort to an event-based system to trigger each individual download.
