What's my favorite success story
of a VSCode extension?
It has to be the Go extension to VSCode
that provides language support for
Go language from Google in VSCode.
I must admit,
I'm a little biased.
That's because I own and manage the open
source project behind this extension.
I joined the VSCode team two years ago.
A month later, I took ownership
of the Go extension.
I knew nothing of VSCode or Go or,
for that matter,
anything open source.
But here we are, two years later,
VSCode is now voted as
the top editor of choice,
in a survey conducted by Google
among the Go developers.
We have double the number of users today
than we had a year ago.
So you can see why I'm so excited.
The success of this extension,
as much as the credit goes to me
or the VSCode team, the same amount of
credit goes to the amazing Go community,
which has been with me
every step of the way.
They are the smart people behind the ideas
that convert into features.
They log the feature requests,
I debate with them on that,
triage it, then add pointers
and a help-wanted label.
And then, very soon I have PRs coming in
for implementing such features.
The most proud I am of these contributors
is because the last
couple of releases
there have been
10 different contributors each,
for each of these updates.
Now ten may not be a big number for you,
but in a open source project managed
by one person,
I believe ten is a huge number.
And the success of this extension
is coming a full circle.
We're now collaborating with Google
itself to provide a language server,
to provide complete
Go language support in VSCode.
But this language server
is not just for VSCode.
Eventually, every other
editor that supports
the language server protocol
can make use of it as well.
So there it is.
My favorite success story.
