To learn about Chrome extensions, I wrote a little ditty that gives a glimpse of the status of all builders on a Buildbot server. The server must be v0.8 or higher as the extension relies on the new JSON REST API.

The button icon in the Chrome toolbar reflects if a build is running or not, and indicates the number of builders that failed the last time they ran. Clicking the button reveals a popup showing details about builders, builds, and build steps. Almost everything is a link leading to buildbot web status pages with additional info. There's also optional audio icons that indicate if a build is starting, has succeeded, or has failed.

The extension satisfies my needs, but is far from perfect. For example, if the server has a large number of builders, the XHR fetch for all the builder info can fail because the URL is too long. Likewise, the popup can grow too large to be useful. I've open sourced the code on GitHub so anyone interested can contribute patches or fork.