Junk Drawer

Ever want a place to store anything you find useful? Now one exists.

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Inspiration

Luke had this idea at 2AM at night inspired from an idea he saw that had entrepreneurs able to share anything they thought was useful to their success, or something they used everyday. For example, Mark Cuban being able to share quotes he looked at everyday. We spun this to have anybody, not just rich business men, have a place to store quotes, code examples, stories, classes, or anything else they use daily or think could be helpful later.

What it does

If you have a junk drawer at home think of it like that. A typical junk drawer has batteries, screwdrivers, tape, light bulbs, etc. This is like that except for anything on the internet. Our Chrome Extension takes a screenshot of any page you want and store it in your personal gallery. From there you can access that drawer and see everything you have thrown in there. This app takes away the stress and hardships of having to label anything you want to store away in a folder. This way you have a general place where anything useful can go.

How we built it

We built this app with no prior knowledge of Chrome Extensions. We used tutorials to hone our skills quickly and produced an Extension that can take screenshots + scrape urls and store them locally. We also used our React JS skills to make a website that can link to both the Chrome Extension and your personal gallery. The React JS website was by far the easiest part. In short we used React JS and a locally stored Chrome Extension to make this website.

Challenges we ran into

Our first major problem was our idea. We could not agree on what we wanted our idea to look like. After coding for a little bit we decided to stick with screenshots alone instead of trying to form it into a JSON file or anything more complicated. After that it was simple coding problems that we ran into. Next problem was how we are going to store the screenshots taken by the extension. We tried firebase and other cloud storage. However, it was late on May 14th when Luke texted me that he just remembered local storage, and we never looked back from there.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I am proud of Luke as he was the main mastermind behind the project and figuring out how to use and create a Chrome Extension. He started the project with zero knowledge on the subject matter, and within two days had a deep understanding of what he needed to do. I am proud of myself because as the more novice programmer in the family I have not finished a a project with Luke before and I think this is a huge step forward for me and us working together.

What we learned

We learned loads about how Chrome Extensions work. Probably more than I will ever need to know again. I learned more about proper professional code formatting. Luke had to help me with that, but I now feel much better about how I should format my code especially in React. We learned each others strengths and weaknesses and are excited to work together in more competitions in the future. With that being said we also learned not to bite off more than we can chew. With our main problem being finding an idea we had less time to code than is desirable. Though we are both happy with the final product we wish we had more time, and hope to continue producing this until completion.

What's next for Junk Drawer

The next steps are mostly polishing. As of writing this the gallery part of the web app is not finished, and the website buttons do not link to anything. So finishing those two features are important and general polishing/making things look pretty is the next steps for us and Junk Drawer.

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