Profile Writing Challenge: A Hack You've Built
May 24, 2022•192 words
Write about a hack you've built. A hack is when you solve a problem quickly with limited resources. What's a problem that you've encountered in your life where you've hacked together a physical, technical, or system-level solution? Write about it in 150 words or less!
When I found myself barraged by addictive newsfeeds on the internet, I knew things couldn't carry on this way. I wanted to visit social websites for my work without being disturbed by algorithm-generated news.
There was already an open-source extension that had helped me get off Facebook by blocking its newsfeed, and I used its underlying functionality to teach introductory web dev to students.
In the spirit of collaborative hacking and teaching, I worked with Grey Software students to build extensions to hide feed elements on Linkedln and Twitter.
These side projects eventually blossomed into Focused Browsing, which now blocks distracting feeds on major social websites while making it simple to toggle feeds with a keyboard shortcut.
What started as a fun hack turned into a product that's helped me and other users stay more focused in a world of growing distractions. I think that's beautiful!