YC-Backed Startup Omniref Building Code Reference Tool

When it comes to answering a programming question, a programmer has to ruffle all the feathers of the various websites, books, blogs, comments, tutorials, endless documentation pages which may have the remotest bit of connection to the problem at hand.

This leaves you with a refined version of your original question, so now enriched with a power tank full of key terms and the right search words, you begin the cycle again and then repeatedly until you hit your answer. This sort of recursive algorithm is unacceptably choppy for the programmer, so Y Combinator-backed Omniref aims to discard this speed-breaker by introducing lightweight search over documentation and ready examples to meet the programmers needs.

The co-founders Tim Robertson and Montana Low set out to build a code reference tool, as they believe that – “Programmers live in code. Coding knowledge should live there too.” It aims to be the ultimate Ruby documentation search with answers in the form of code snippets instead of more tunnel clues.

It is a code referencing tool that could help developers get assistance from others having hit the same brick wall or who are building upon the same code. It is documenting code to answer the queries of coders, in essence, building a huge library for all the coding knowledge.

Originally launched as a code search tool for Ruby in November 2013, the site has since added a Q/A feature resembling Genius’s annotation feature, as made famous by Rap Genius. It employs a version-aware system which ensures that the answers to your query stay relevant and reject any irrelevant or out-of-date information. Omniref can be linked to your browser, Ruby source code on Github, and even as instant answers to your Google queries.

In addition to this, there’s also a news feed in the works that helps keep you up-to-date with which technologies to use and updates related to the code in your projects. All said and done, Omniref is an emerging and a huge database of comprehensive search over every version of every ruby gem, and all of the code from every version of the ruby standard library.

YC-Backed Startup Omniref Building Code Reference Tool