Since I moved from Ubuntu to Fedora early this year, I changed my desktop environment from unity to Gnome Shell.
I must say it is a great experience. At the beginning I was thinking on what was better compared to unity (because I did not like Unity). Regarding this comparison I found a more stable and usable window manager. I still prefer something simpler perhaps, but it works good and it is nice.
Just out of curiosity, one day I started managing some extensions. Oh, by the way, you will probably be installing some extensions for Gnome shell, some of them are useful and some others make it more usable. That drove me to the extensions developer API, which turned out to be quite simple and interesting.
Having played a little bit, I decided to code a (very) simple extension that does just one single thing. I called it "simple-name" and it is available at: Simple-Name-Extension
It remembers some little detail I was missing from some previous window managers that I have used along the years, which is to display the username of the currently logged-in user.
I must say that, I code it just for the sake of learning and experimenting with and API and a bit of JavaScript. In addition I found very interesting to see front-end related technologies like JavaScript or CSS used in the desktop environment (not that is something new, but still funny).
To sum up, I wanted to highlight that is interesting to learn new technologies, even with little and simple steps like a new API, library, etc. It is not for the technology itself, but for the sake of learning :)