Knot contact homology is a knot invariant derived from counting holomorphic curves with boundary on the Legendrian conormal to a knot. I will discuss some new developments around the subject, including an enhancement that completely determines the knot (joint work with Tobias Ekholm and Vivek Shende) and recent progress in the circle of ideas connecting knot contact homology, recurrence relations for colored HOMFLY polynomials, and topological strings (joint work in progress with Tobias Ekholm).