Hum - Personal Soundscapes

My little extension which I've done almost nothing to promote has 30 users. I did make one bug fix since launch, and I have some user feedback I want to incorporate. Knowing that I have other people using the extension is simultaneously motivating and a bit intimidating. What if I make a change that someone who likes the extension doesn't like?

I shared a personal story about needing this tool, using the quarantine time to work through CS50, and a little about how to use the tool. I got really positive feedback, which for someone who rarely shares anything and had never released software before felt pretty good!

I shared a variation of the story to the CS50 sub-reddit and got even more positive feedback, a handful of installs and some valuable user feedback.

I stalled out on sharing more about this project, but now I'm writing this story up here on Indie Hackers to just get in the groove of sharing my story of building more regularly. :-)

Publishing on the Chrome Web Store is really straight-forward. The interface is straightforward and submitting a package is easy. I did have to create an external webpage to link to about the extension, so I used my (very crappy) portfolio site hosted on github to make a barebones support page. (Writing this update is reminding me how much I need to redo my portfolio site!!)

The only slight pitfall to the Chrome Webstore publishing process was that it was yet still more asset generation. I didn't expect to be using Photoshop so much for this project! I felt like I didn't really write any code for a long stretch of time while plugging away at the finish. Unfortunately I'm the kind of person that really needs to focus on just one project at a time, so trying to split my time on a different project to make sure I'm coding every day just wasn't feasible.

I really wanted my first piece of software to not look like it was just "programmer art". I have a little bit of graphic design experience and zero budget for even a Fiverr logo, so I took a stab at designing my own. I looked at a lot of audio-based apps for design inspiration, and I really wanted to capture the idea of overlapping or layering. As for the blue, I just like blue. :-)

The content, mostly the audio files, took a lot longer than I expected as well. There are lots of free audio sample sites on the web, but finding just the right sounds was time-consuming, and then I had to teach myself some basics of audio editing to properly level the files so the volume levels roughly corresponded to each other in the tool. Honestly, I still feel like that needs work and a couple of the audio samples I'm not crazy about, so I will probably eventually replace them.

I first set out to learn the basics of Chrome extensions. Google's example extension was really helpful as a base model, and Chrome's API documentation was decent. I felt a bit lost with the concept of asynchronous callbacks in JS, so I had some detours along the way to learn some more language fundamentals. I also found a great audio library called Howler that I could never have built my extension without.

I felt like the code was the hard part, but the final styling and branding took me longer than I expected. More on that in next milestone.

I spent much of my Covid quarantine time to work through Harvard's CS50 course online. I took the web track and fumbled my way through building a small portfolio site, but I always wanted to make a Chrome extension. I had learned the fundamentals of HTML, CSS, JS as well as the core concepts of MVC design, so I felt ready to tackle a real project. My inspiration for building Hum came from the fact that - especially while coding - I need to maintain complete focus and any background noises would derail my progress.