String Connector & Namer

A Figma plugin + backend service that connects design content to engineering string catalogs – surfacing exact matches, suggesting names for new strings, and submitting string keys & value pairs to GitHub as pull requests.

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Title

Type

Figma Plugin

Date

2026

Problem

No standardized process existed for handing off content (within designs) to engineering. Duplicated strings, inconsistently named keys, and a highly manual copy/paste process all contributed to errors even when the copy in Figma was correct. All these issues were only exacerbated by the company's international expansion.

Approach

I built a Figma plugin that scans selected frames and matches every text layer against ~30,000 strings across 6 repositories — web, mobile, Android, iOS, comms, and the central localization registry.

Matches surface in under 200ms. The plugin shows 8 match types: exact, template, fuzzy (via Levenshtein distance), cross-platform, and 3 tiers of suggested keys ranked by confidence. It also integrates with Smartling, the company’s translation platform, so matches already in the translation pipeline rank higher.

For strings that don’t exist yet, the plugin suggests a name using a standardized naming convention – developed in partnership with the localization program manager. The designer or engineer using the plugin can then submit the string key and value pairs to GitHub as a pull request – directly from Figma.

The backend is a Python/FastAPI service hosted on internal infrastructure. It loads the full string index from GitHub on startup and builds an in-memory search index, scoped by repo.

Outcome

The before/after is stark. Getting a string from a design file into shipped code currently takes 5+ days, 8+ steps, 4+ tools, and 3+ people. With the plugin, that compresses to ~10 minutes, 4 steps, 2 tools, and 1–2 people.

Before the infrastructure blockers materialized: the SVP of Product saw an early demo at a Design Leadership Review onsite and said to ship it “as soon as possible,” specifically citing the engineering time it would save. The tool was also featured in the March 2026 Product Design team newsletter.

The plugin is complete and functional. Org-wide rollout is pending a network-level fix on the internal hosting platform and GitHub write permissions – neither of which are problems with the tool itself. I'm working on a Claude skill version of the String Connector to get the core matching and naming logic in front of engineers faster, without waiting on a hosting solution.