For your next side project, make a browser extension

Easy operations

I had a strict rule for this project: no operational stress . This meant no servers, and no data storage.

The tool was shipped as a purely client-side browser extension, using Twitter’s backend for search. I didn’t have my own user accounts; the extension would just send requests from the user’s browser using their authentication cred

Very often, people would tell me they had forgotten that Twemex wasn’t part of Twitter itself. I think this also points to the benefits for users: would you rather have to learn a whole new interface, or just have your existing one seamlessly improved?

Easy to find an idea

Transformational ideas for software—the ones that could become huge businesses and change the world—are rare and hard to spot. Even when they do work out, they often take tremendous effort and require an appetite for risk.

In contrast, incremental improvements to existing software are far easier to find . If you’re opinionated ab

So, if you’re a programmer: the next time you come across an annoying problem on a web app frontend, maybe consider writing a browser extension to make it better, and then share it so that other people can benefit too.