painting about the connectedness of a black programmer from behind and computer, pet, phones and apps in modern abstract greyscale --ar 40:20. Generated by Midjourney

Essential kit is a project to build high quality, maintenable and privacy-friendly browser extensions for today’s internet users.

This project came about as part of my exploration into building lasting software products; a curious tale of optimization between time, cost and quality. The effort has yielded several category leaders on the Chrome Webstore and invaluable lessons on software maintenace.



I spend a great deal of time on the browser, alongside a good number of extensions. The most pressing issue that stood out to me when I started this project was privacy and security in the ecosystem.

User trust is a paramount concern of mine, and influenced certain attributes of this project like the decision to open-source the code for the extensions, to make it offline-first and to not obfuscate it.

Thus far, I have developed processes that make it easy for me to create, publish and maintain the essential kit extensions with little bandwidth. I plan to kep this site updated with my learnings on building browser extensions as well as ideas on keeping them maintenable and successful.

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Justice