Popkit is a personal open-source project I started at the beginning of 2025. I developed it with the goal of creating a flexible and expressive component library for modern frontend development. The components are designed for integration in React-based projects, with a focus on control and extensibility.
This project was born from a desire to contribute to the open-source ecosystem. When I entered the IT field, I benefited from a huge number of shared resources, and I wanted to give something back. Popkit is an attempt to do that in a modest but concrete way.
The target audience is frontend developers working on custom web interfaces. Instead of installing a dependency, they can browse the Popkit documentation, copy the components they need, and modify them freely in their own codebase.
Problem and Context
Most component libraries are designed around installable packages. While this is convenient, it often comes with trade-offs: loss of control over internal logic, need to adapt styles to a foreign design system, or reliance on breaking changes in the upstream library.
Popkit takes the opposite approach. All components are meant to be copied and pasted. This gives developers full control, avoids dependency management, and lets them adjust styles, logic, or animations as needed. The project doesn’t aim to compete with existing UI kits, but to offer a complementary set of expressive components for integration-heavy projects.
The library is written in React, TypeScript, and TailwindCSS. It uses minimal abstractions and no runtime dependencies.
Process and Choices
The core of the project is a documentation site listing all available components. For each one, the documentation includes:
→ The full source code
→ A step-by-step explanation of how to implement it
→ Live examples showing variations with different props
→ A list of all props with descriptions and default values
Each component is designed to be animated, easily themeable, and responsive. TailwindCSS is used to keep the code readable and utility-based. TypeScript ensures clarity in the prop interfaces.
There is no versioning or release schedule. New components are added progressively, based on ideas I collect from real-world UIs, playground experiments, or aesthetic inspirations. I maintain a Notion list where I log ideas and prioritize based on implementation time and visual interest.
There is no CI/CD, testing pipeline, or bundling system, because Popkit is not a packaged library. The goal is to maintain a clean codebase, good examples, and clear documentation rather than abstracted components.
Results
The full source code is available on Github
The documentation site is public at popkit.dev
The site is regularly updated with new components, improvements, and usage examples. Some components are more experimental, others are ready for direct production use.
There are currently no analytics or user tracking in place. However, the project has served as a useful reference for my own work and has been shared with a few frontend developers in my network.
Reflections
Popkit helped me reinforce habits around clean component design, documentation writing, and prop structuring. It also gave me a space to explore how to make components both expressive and readable, without introducing unnecessary abstraction.
I gained fluency in combining TailwindCSS with animation frameworks and refined how I write reusable logic in TypeScript. I also spent time working on visual hierarchy and prop-based customization patterns.
The project is ongoing. I continue to add components at my own pace, and I plan to include more advanced UI blocks in the future. I see Popkit as a low-friction way to contribute to the frontend community and document visual patterns I find interesting.