As someone who doesn’t like following a strict curriculum, I wanted to instead focus on building small projects that genuinely interest me. Thinking this approach will not only make learning more enjoyable but will also help me pick up essential skills along the way.

For my first project, I chose to create a Chrome extension. The inspiration behind this project was my passive approach to financial markets - I rarely follow what is going on, but I feel like I should. So I thought it would be beneficial to create a little widget to check in on the markets in a simple way.

A yassification of financial resources, if u will <3

Last year, I made a TikTok video about buying bitcoin, so I knew making that information visible via this chrome extension could be beneficial. Luckily, alternative.me has a Bitcoin Fear and Greed Index API. And once I had a clear understanding of the information that I could access via this API, I started designing ~

I wanted to keep the design super simple and light! I also made the default configuration to be on the conservative side - only signaling a buying opportunity (thumbs up) when the market is in "Extreme Fear".

There were two documents that I referenced that were most helpful to me in getting this off the ground:

1. the Google Chrome Developers sample projects

2. Rapid API example for how to call APIs

The documentation for the Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index API was missing some things, but I was able to get around it by looking at historical data. I’d say the most challenging part was probably creating the marquee (esp. with the deprecation of the marquee html tag). But it was pretty smooth all in all!

I’m so happy with how it turned out! You can add it to your own chrome browser here:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bitcoin-fear-and-greed-in/kacliekmnlmmdeiehmnpkdejfinponbb

Here’s the final design!