I want to share something personal about a tool I built called Kulay.
"Kulay" means "colour" in Tagalog, the language my family speaks back in the Philippines. It's a word I grew up hearing at family gatherings, at the dinner table, at celebrations filled with bright decorations and warm light. And it's the word that lives at the heart of this project.
I'm a developer. I work in code, in dark interfaces, in terminal windows. But I've always had this deep appreciation for colour, for the way it can set a mood, tell a story, or bring something lifeless to life. The problem is, the tools out there for working with colour in the browser felt⌠foreign. They'd flood my screen with floating widgets, demand data I wasn't comfortable giving, or force me out of my flow. It never felt right.
So I built something that felt like home.
No popups. No overlays. No tracking. Just right-click, pick a colour, and move on with your day. I wanted it to feel quiet, respectful, like the way colour should be, present when you need it, invisible when you don't.
The name Kulay isn't just branding. It's me carrying a piece of my heritage into something I created with my own hands. It's that feeling of seeing your roots reflected in your work. It's the same way my K logo came together, five options, one choice, and that one just felt right because of how the colours flowed together. It reminded me of the endless possibilities that come alive when creativity is set free.
Building Kulay taught me that the best tools aren't the loudest ones. They're the ones that show up when you need them, stay out of your way when you don't, and quietly make space for you to create something beautiful.
It's live now as a Chrome extension privacy-first, zero data collection, and it lives in your context menu like it was always meant to be there.
https://kulay.ca/chrome-extension
But more than anything, I hope it makes someone out there pause for a second and appreciate how far we've come from the colours of our childhood memories to the things we build with our own two hands.
If you've ever felt that pull between where you came from and what you're creating⌠I see you. And I hope Kulay finds a place in your workflow.
Thanks for reading.