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I wrote the first version of Firefox extension of Simple Gmail Notes about one and half year ago, and now I am forced to develop a new one using WebExtension technology, because the old jpm addons would be fully disabled after Firefox 57.

That was quite a surprise, because when I started to develop the extension back then, jpm was the most recommended technology for Firefox addon development. And I suffered so much during the development.

Anyway, now the the extension already got some problems with new Firefox (FF 50+), especially with the OAuth. So I am left no choice except starting on this ASAP.

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Since I have migrated the extension of Simple Gmail Notes as an official side project of the new company , I would like to keep a more rigid development process of this.

Very soon, the extension would need to support 4 different environments, it would be run for:

1. Chrome + Gmail
2. Firefox + Gmail
3. Chrome + Google Inbox
4. Firefox + Google Inbox

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One week after the Chrome extension of simple gmail notes was released, I started to plan on porting of extension to Firefox.

There are 2 major incentives for this porting:

1. I spent quite a lot of effort to work out the google API for the extension. Most of them are just RESTful HTTP API, which are supposed to work with Firefox extension right alway.
2. During the implementation of Google extension, I tried to get way from most Chrome specific API (e.g. chrome sync). So theoretically most code should work with Firefox extension.

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Say, your own a small team of capable programmers, and you need to build an an mobile app across two platforms (iOS and Android), what would be your best bet?

Currently, there are a lot of different ways to do that, and that’s exactly the biggest problem to many people. If we have no other choices, then we would simply build one iOS app and build one android app, without thinking too much. Unfortunately, that’s not the case today. We have a lot of different choices now, in fact, we have too many choices.

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For a long time, I wanted a browser extension that allows me simply add notes to the Gmail. It is because I need some easy way to mark down the comments on the resumes of candidates, Sometimes they would send the resumes across a long time span. Of course I could mark down the notes on evernote, but it’s time-consuming and difficult to have an organized list of comments overall candidates, most of which I would not review for the second time.

There was a useful plugin called Notes-For-Gmail. Yet it stopped functioning months ago, and I have no way to contact the author.

Finally I decided my own one, as I really need this. And it seems to be a good chance to learn the Google chrome extension writing as well.

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By the Aliyun conference of 2015, I saw a lot of news about docker. And it’s the third time of the year that I heard about docker.

I was lucky enough to have some quick conversations with the docker developers there, and I found that it’s really mature now. In fact, TaoBao also used docker for the internal deployment procedures, so I decided to try to move some projects of our company into the world of docker.

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There are so many comparisons of Git vs SVN outside, but as far as I can tell, 99% of them are biased. (And so is this one, probably.)

And there are many Git tutorials outside, and none is clear enough so others could get on hand easily. In fact, it remains to be one of the major drawbacks of Git.

I have used SVN for many years, and used Git for quite a while now. I admit that I am not yet an expert of Git, but I have tried and suffered a number of traps of Git, and I learned a lot from those painful experiences. Some of the traps could get me stuck for one day.