blog

Stele is the gold standard UI inspiration bookmarking tool for frontend developers and designers. These are notes on collecting UI worth keeping, and on getting from a reference to working code.

• Tools·10 min read

  Chrome extensions every frontend developer and designer should install

  Twelve extensions that earn their permissions, grouped by the job they do, with an honest note on which ones are redundant with devtools you already have.

• Technique·12 min read

  Extracting design tokens (colors, fonts, spacing) from any website

  Console snippets that pull the real type ramp, spacing scale, and custom properties out of a live page, the traps that make naive extraction wrong, and when to stop doing it by hand.

• Practice·9 min read

  Why designers and developers need a shared reference workspace

  The handoff problem is usually described as a tooling gap between Figma and code. It is actually a shared-evidence gap, and it shows up long before handoff.

• AI·11 min read

  From screenshot to code: how AI-assisted capture-to-code workflows work

  Why a model handed a PNG guesses, what it stops guessing when you hand it computed styles instead, and a realistic account of what these workflows do and do not produce today.

• Tools·12 min read

  Productivity tools every frontend developer should have in 2026

  Not a list of thirty apps. Seven categories where tooling genuinely changes the shape of the work, the current best options in each, and the three categories where the popular advice is wrong.

• Practice·11 min read

  How to build a UI pattern library from things you find on the web

  A pattern library is not a component library. How to collect real implementations of the same problem, what to record about each, and how to turn twelve examples of a permissions screen into a decision you can defend.

• Workflow·8 min read

  The best way to save and organize screenshots of UI you like

  Screenshots are the default and the default is bad. What a screenshot throws away, when a screenshot is still the right call, and how to make a folder of 2,000 of them searchable again.

• Tools·13 min read

  Mood board tools for developers, compared

  Raindrop, mymind, Obsidian, Sublime, Savee, Eagle, Are.na, Notion, Figma, and Stele, judged on the thing developers actually need: does anything survive the capture that helps you build it.

• Workflow·10 min read

  Building a personal design reference library that actually gets used

  The difference between a reference library and a hoard is retrieval. What to keep, what to throw away, and the four failure modes that kill a library somewhere between item 50 and item 500.

• Workflow·9 min read

  How to organize UI inspiration as a frontend developer

  Most inspiration folders die because they store pictures instead of decisions. A system that survives past 200 items, and what to capture so a reference is still useful a year later.