Punderline 11: The Model T

I’m just a regular engineering student. I mean, sure, I like watching random educational youtube videos, using computers, and programming for fun, but I mean, hey, that’s why I’m in ECE. Yet, I’m not a hacker, nor do I have the skills to even remotely consider myself one. And even despite the plethora of reasons I should fail, I managed to do what I thought I could never do.

Recently, I was trying to figure out a way to create my own arbitrary precision floating point arithmetic library. For those of you unaware, floating point simply means numbers are represented in scientific notation and that allows computers to express really large or really small numbers and everything in between. However, one problem of floating point numbers is that they are normally represented with a limited amount of precision.

I admit, I used to think contributing to Firefox was basically impossible, especially as someone who didn’t yet know Rust or C++. And even if I overcame this hurdle, I thought it was hard to get set up, difficult to find bugs that are well-scoped to what I can actually accomplish given my skillset, and challenging to understand the complex codebases that would be typical of large software projects. But I wanted to help. And after hacking Google Chrome, I realized that maybe I could, or at least I could try.

Midway changed a lot from its humble beginnings as a simple prototype to the complex extension it is now. Let’s explore how it changed. Check out the latest version of the extension on the Chrome Web Store.