OctoLinker 2016: A retrospective

It feels like it was yesterday when I was writing the first lines of code for the OctoLinker Chrome extension three years ago. It was between Christmas and New Year’s and my npm crawler was running all day to generate the lookup file. Since then, the OctoLinker code base changed a lot. In May this year, version 4.0.0 was released. This release was a complete rewrite in order to prepare the project for the future, such as adding support for other languages besides JavaScript.

Before, the link replacement wasn’t very accurate and from time to time it just didn’t work. By separating the “code-reading part” from the link injection part, the extension improved a lot. The Blob Reader can be tested easily and returns a well defined format which describes the current code.

The plugin architecture, which is responsible for wrapping the string with a link, is quite flexible. Some contributions from outside the team have proven that less effort is required to extend the project with new features.

As I mentioned earlier, the main reason for the rewrite was to make adding new languages easier. The increasing number of languages and tools shows that our effort continue to pay off.

That’s a pretty amazing list of features, isn’t it?

New targets

Until this year, the OctoLinker was only available to Chrome users. With 4.2.0 we added support for Firefox and Opera. In total, more than 11.000 (eleven thousand!) users are using the OctoLinker! Special thanks to everyone who has helped to make this possible

Behind the scenes

Besides the exciting changes to the code base, the project as a whole developed as well. @josephfrazier_ joined the team as first core contributor and I really do enjoy working with him. Thank you for all the effort that you put into this project.

Also I would like to thank Christian Kahl for this lovely mascot. I love it! Stickers will be available soon!

What’s next

Our mission to add support for other languages continues. If you would like to request an enhancement or take part in our mission, please create an issue or contact @octolinker on Twitter.

There are still many people who have never heard about the OctoLinker project. Please share the project with your friends, colleagues, followers and help us to link together, what belongs together.

Thanks for reading!