Developing a Strategy: Steps to Creating Productivity in a Digital Workplace

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Stevan Kostoski

Stevan Kostoski
Software Developer

INSCALE Article - Developing a Strategy: Steps to Creating Productivity in a Digital Workplace.

When it comes to daily work, we use a lot of different productivity tools such as Ticketing system, tracking systems, a variety of communications applications but most of the time we spend on internet browsers and sharing links between our colleagues.

Since we spend so much time on Internet Browsers, we can take advantage of their extensions or develop one if we need such.

Browsers
Every modern internet browser support extension:
Chrome Extensions, Firefox Add-ons, Opera addons, Edge Extensions.

Every extension has several components that are common for each browser. They have a manifest file, where all the important information about the extension are stored. Such as name, version, icon, permissions and other important stuff for the user and the store where the extension is available.

Besides the manifest file, there is always an html file index.html, where the main screen of the extensions is developed and a few JavaScript files where UI logic is stored. That is it, they are tiny little applications that can boost your productivity or you can use them for fun (there are a lot of games developed as browser extensions).

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Every browser has its development kit/API that you can use to access important information related to the current browsing session, for example URL of the active tab, how many tabs are open etc.

You can find a lot of info and tutorial on how to build one on these links:
Link 1
Link 2

My team is using a Jira ticketing software and we share a lot of links when we talk about tasks/stories that we are working on. If you have noticed a lot of links on such sites/systems have fixed part of the URL, and the end few characters are different.

For example:
https://jira.yourcompany.com/browse/AX-3830
https://jira.yourcompany.com/browse/AX-3822
https://jira.yourcompany.com/browse/AX-2592

Usually, we refer to stories/tasks by their last prefix since it’s the code name of the story. “Did you see the AX-383?”. “Are you having trouble with AX-221?”, “I’m done with AX-202, I’ll start the next one.”

For this purpose, I have developed a URL Combine browser extension.

In this extension, you can define what is the fixed part of your URL, In our case it’s https://jira.yourcompany.com/browse/ , also there is a fixed part “AX-” and in the end, only the number varies.

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When you once set the URL and the Prefix (it’s optional) you can simply click the extension and pop-up will appear where you enter the last part of the URL, in this case, 2592, and the extension will open a link in a new tab. Also, you can use the shortcut CTR+SHIFT+F.

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You can download and check this extension: Chrome and Firefox.
You can find the source code of it on my repo.