It’s been 4 weeks now, since we started working on Lightbeam 2.0. And we have an MVP!

Here are my earlier posts on Outreachy and Lightbeam:

• Outreachy – suspense unfolds
• Lightbeam – why & what
• Lightbeam – Q & A

The first milestone in this internship is this initial MVP. Every time, I and Bianca went astray from this milestone, we had our mentor Jonathan to guide and help us focus towards this direction.

Here is the summary of what’s been achieved so far:

Setup the basic web extension

• Load a manifest.json file
• Click the Lightbeam icon from the browseraction
• Launch an index.html

The Backend

• Setup the communication with the browser and capture the first & third party websites
• Create the capture & viz objects and the store API
  • capture object stores into the store object
  • viz object draws to a canvas
  • The lightbeam page code reads from the store, draws with the viz to a canvas in index.html

The Frontend

• UI
  • In this initial MVP, the goal was to replicate the old UI. CSS Grid layout is used in the new codebase
• Visualisations
  • While visualisations will be a major part in the post-MVP, in this initial MVP we are drawing small circles using the Canvas API to show the first and the third party websites

Overall, the whole team is very happy with the work and the progress done so far.

Presenting, Lightbeam 2.0