Show HN: Create Chrome Extensions for internal use | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Create Chrome Extensions for internal use

extension.dev

47 pointskkevv28 comments

As somebody who has built quite a few of these internal extensions through the years, technical hurdles were never the problem.

The problem was to persuade managers that they were worth the effort, persuade workers that I wouldn’t “screw up” their preciously-pristine browser, and persuade IT not to use their “UNAUTHORIZED SOFTWARE!!11!” flamethrower. In short, exclusively people-problems.

Keep that in mind, in terms of who you need to sell this to.

Haha, thank you for sharing your insight!

How did you push through all the people-problems? Was the productivity gained from the extensions the angle you pushed?

Obviously, and it typically requires triangulating alliances (users & managers vs IT, or users & IT vs managers, occasionally IT & managers vs users but that's often a symptom the tool is not good).

One big issue most managers care about, is long-term maintainability. When you sell this, you should probably advise customers to have more than one person skilled up and responsible for maintaining the resulting tools. I was often bounced because "once you leave, nobody will know how to fix this" (which is fair, and happened more often than not). Making it easy to share projects is key.

Gotcha, thank you so much for the advice. Maintainability, especially with something uncommon like a Chrome Extension, must seem really sticky.

There is a huge market of these kind of tools for hyperscaling IRL market startups like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, Airbnb, Ghostkitchens etc.du

They scale up and hire a shitton operations people with a small technical knack - while working with the same shitty systems that they built for the first year of the company.

Combine that with the massive blitscaling they do by just constantly opening new cities and new countries.

And you have a massive demand for quick fixes to bandaid scaling issues. Ive seen companies use shit like iMacros extensions, vimium browser extensions and also custom chrome extenstion to fix that.

Nowadays its pushing more to google appscript (gsheet scripting language) and stuff like airtable/coda, maybe in some cases advanced shit like retool (INSANE).

Woah, thank you so much for sharing!! This is really amazing to hear :0

If you are down would love to chat more! kevin@extension.dev

I signed up.

Hey HN and the broader world!

We are incredibly excited to share what we have been cooking up . After building Chrome Extensions for recruiters and marketers, we got a glimpse of the power of browser extensions. However, we also got a taste of how hard extensions are to create. This led us down a path of exploring whether companies were interested in building custom internal extensions.

We studied hundreds of custom internal extensions that companies are using today. We've seen companies extend legacy internal tools to increase development speed, create context-aware tools that surface info employees need wherever they are. We've even seen extensions add missing features to purchased software. After synthesizing into a few modes, we set out to build an easier way to create internal extensions.

Come say hi! We are excited to meet you and hopefully help you build some extensions too!

Kevin, Will, James

Just signed up for the wait list. I know from first hand experience how tough it is to build extensions from scratch. Excited to try this out.

Just had a call with Kevin and my mind got blown away. The product, although very early on, is superb! The possibilities it opens for companies that are scaling is simply amazing! I'm looking very much forward to see this being used by my company in the not-so-distant future! Well done K/W/J!

Woooo thank you for the kind words Flávio :) Excited to help you out really really soon!!

We've also spent quite some time researching what extensions companies are already building! Would love to share what we learned: https://dev.to/realkevinyang/what-i-learned-from-studying-10...

Lmk if you have any questions! I'll be here :)

Aren't companies using Robotic process automation (RPA) software solutions to automate workflows.

There are also tools like Selenium, AutoIt and iMacros to automate workflows but I think the best thing is to have in house made native solution for your workflow automation but I guess not all companies can afford it.

Yeah! RPA is a really really powerful tool. We've seen companies hack RPA to add UI to existing tools as well.

Selenium is a bit tough because you end up with scripts that are hard for business users to execute. AutoIt and iMacros are solid web automation tools, but they lack the extensibility of a custom solution (to do things like add UI) and are also hard to share with non-technical users across a company.

I like it. Do you support WebSQL?

One category of apps I think would be interesting is caching SaaS data locally to make for fast search. e.g. Intercom is painfully slow, I want an extension that caches recent Intercom data for fast search and messaging.

We made this extension recently. It lets you query data in any `<table>` in any open Chrome tab. Pretty nuts what you can build with extensions vs. a standard web app. Good luck!

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sqanything/naejbcf...

https://doc.seekwell.io/sqanything

Woah that's amazing! I thought the name SeekWell was familiar, I think we used your SQL -> GSheets integration before!

Cool, curious, what company were you at?

Good luck with the new thing!

awesome! Have you considered taking payments? I recently made a browser extension payment system that you don't even need to run your own server to use: https://extensionpay.com/

This is cool, extremely relevant now that Google removed payments for extensions!

We are free during the developer preview/beta and plan to have a really generous hobby tier. We are rolling our own Stripe integration down the road for enterprise users!

Ohh, We haven't tried WebSQL yet with our builder, but from a quick Google search it seems possible!

Another route is to use something like http://alasql.org/ to cache data in localstorage so you can query it instantly. Would a search UX be better, or a text box to directly write SQL over your data?

Yeah, we use alasql in the app I linked to below. It's amazing! Also supports querying CSV's, Excel, Sheets, etc. Pretty amazing package.

interesting. my company is stuck using these shitty internal tools that i'd like to customize.

can i use this to extend them (like add buttons, UI elements, surface data from API calls, scrape data)?

Did you build the tools yourself/do you have access to the code?

One of our big use cases is to extend/customize internal tools with UI/data/logic. Could you share more details? If you're more comfortable offline kevin@extension.dev

some are in-house but doing code surgery on the tool and then redeploying our stack is annoying. we'd rather make quick modifications on the front end.

some are SaaS where we don't have access to the codebase. think Salesforce, Zendesk, or Jira.

you can do anything you want without building your own extension https://www.tampermonkey.net

Yeah! We drew a lot of inspiration from TamperMonkey. We think of what we are building almost as an "enterprise user script." We have a "shell" extension that hosts all the UI, automations, and JS that you write. And, when you are ready to share with your team, you can just install our shell extension, login, and everything you built is instantly available to those with access!

Some time ago I made a script manager(https://github.com/fxnoob/Hand-in-the-air) inspired by Alexa skills system. Where you invoke scripts with hand gestures or with your voice.

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