My name is Steve Ruiz and I'm a developer, designer, and now startup founder in London. I have a background in visual art and work primarily in creative tools for the web. I build lots of prototypes. Sometimes those prototypes turn into products.

tldraw

I'm currently running tldraw, a startup I formed in 2022 around my infinite canvas SDK for React of the same name. Developers use the tldraw SDK to accelerate development of whiteboards and other canvas-like applications. The project's "demo" (tldraw.com) has become a popular end-user application, too, with close to 500,000 monthly active users. We're a Series A company based by Lux, Definition, Amplify, and others; and we're based in London with our office in Finsbury Park.

Previous Work

I've previously worked with Play, helping to design a mobile-first design application for iOS. Before that, I was creating educational content for Framer. You can read more about my professional history on my LinkedIn.

Open Source

I've created and occassionally maintain several source projects:

• tldraw is a tiny little drawing app.
• globs is a globs-based design app.
• perfect-freehand is a library for drawing freehand lines.
• perfect-arrows is a library for drawing arrows between points and shapes. It made for some fun tweet threads.
• state-designer is a state management library with its own visual design environment. It's based on state charts and is great for prototyping.

You can sponsor my work on Github!

Contact

The best way to contact me is on twitter.