Tim Scanlin

Coder, Maker, & Designer

Open Source Projects in 2016

2016 has been full of many ups and downs, but at least I was able to launch a couple of small open source projects this year. The projects are called Tocbot and serverless-s3-crud, try to guess what they do and read below to hear more about them. Hopefully people find them useful and build cool stuff with them.

Tocbot

Tocbot was first created on 3/22/2016. The idea for it came to me when I wanted a table of contents with jump links for navigating long pages with a lot of text. I found a library called Tocify that worked and basically did what I wanted, but I didn't like that it had dependencies on jQuery AND jQuery UI which are huge, and it was also no longer actively maintained; so I decided to write my own library with no jQuery dependencies that used native DOM methods instead. The result is Tocbot, which is currently used on Optimizely's developer documentation and also used on Tocbot's webpage.

Tocbot was featured in JS Weekly issue #283 and HTML Weekly (now Frontend Focus) issue #239 which was awesome. You can still read them here and here (respectively).

tocbot js weekly JS Weekly

tocbot html5 weekly HTML5 Weekly

Note: These are both run by the same guy, Peter Cooper. Check out his website and subscribe to the above newsletters if you are interested in web development.

Tocbot has 122 stars as of 12/27/2016. I am glad that it provides simple but useful functionality without needing a lot of dependencies.

Serverless S3 crud

Serverless-s3-crud is my most recent project, it was first started on 11/15/2016. It is a service meant to be used with Serverless and now it is currently listed as the third service in the services section of their README. It does exactly what you would expect, it provides a serverless crud REST API for interacting with S3. There was already a serverless-crud project which is similar but backed by Dynamo DB instead. I definitely plan to make use of this in future projects and I hope other people find it useful as well.

Go check out Tocbot and serverless-s3-crud if you haven't already and tweet @ me or open an issue on github if you have any feedback.

27 Dec 2016

© 2023 Tim Scanlin