Viewing profile — mfrisbie

https://mattfriz.com

So this extension is feeding a stream of your browsing activity to a bunch of third party services? No thanks.

Looks nice, but that extension is a high-value acquisition target for bad actors, and there's nothing but an email for contact information. Sideloading eliminates this risk complet…

I kept catching myself scrolling down their idiotic feed and wondering what the hell I was doing. Mindless dreck, all of it. Yet I still get cold inbound from it that turns into bu…

Some charge a nominal fee, and one I had to travel to a studio to record. Made for a nice weekend in LA with my wife.

I run Track & Trace Tools[1], an extension directly targeted at the legal cannabis industry's main compliance platform Metrc. Since it's targeted at businesses and not consumers, w…

I tried very hard to find a way around using an external server, as I knew HN would harp on the related privacy issues. No luck.

I'll admit, the launch messaging could have been better.

For the record, this is bang on.

Creator here - you bet! It's a big problem.

Creator here. A check automatically runs every hour, and if there are any changes detected, a badge appears over the extension icon. I decided anything more than that was too invas…

Creator here. It does self-detect (chrome.management.getAll() returns all installed extensions), but fair point.

I've been self-employed for nearly two years. I work on a Chrome extension [1] that is used by a significant fraction of the US legal cannabis industry for compliance. 2/3 of my ti…

A big factor in my industry was scanning damaged barcodes, which was frequent since they're attached to indoor/outdoor plants and physical boxes that get moved around. They get wea…

Native apps use Android/iOS scanning libraries that are much more effective than the in-browser options. They are still nowhere near as good as hardware scanners.

The initial idea involved a low-friction onboarding that didn't require any extra hardware - "Just use your phone to scan!". Stupid. Turns out that workers would rather manually ke…

Resolution is certainly a major factor in the scanning acuity. The browser scanning issue is somewhat paradoxical: getting a clear and high-resolution image of the barcode improves…

QR codes are very easy to scan in-browser, but 1D barcodes are significantly more challenging. ~75% of the cannabis industry deals with Metrc, which forces companies to place 1D Co…

ChatGPT for Google was #1 on HN earlier this year. Check out the GitHub repo now: that person sold the extension. I had a small side project extension, ~25,000 installs & free to u…

My favorite Metrc API wart was submitting harvests when their API servers were bogged down. Sometimes, your "create harvest" request would get stuck in a transaction pool that woul…