Steve Ruiz
Founder at tldraw
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSteve Ruiz is a London-based founder and front-end specialist with nine years of experience crafting intuitive, canvas-first design tools and UIs. As Founder & CEO of tldraw and an active contributor to notable open-source projects like Excalidraw and perfect-freehand, he blends product design instincts with hands-on React development to improve drawing, export, and interaction experiences. His work frequently focuses on polishing UX details—exporting, touch handling, theming, and visual affordances—that make complex infinite-canvas interactions feel delightfully simple. With a background in fine arts (MFA) and roles across product and design at companies like Framer and ClearScore, he brings a rare mix of visual craft and engineering rigor to developer-facing design tools.
9 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Fine Arts - BFA, VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS, Bachelor of Fine Arts - BFA, VISUAL AND PERFORMING ARTS at Northern Illinois UniversityMaster of Fine Arts - MFA, Visual Art, Master of Fine Arts - MFA, Visual Art at University of Chicago
Github Skills (18)
javascript10
canvas10
ui-components10
css10
typescript10
ui-design10
drawing10
uid10
svg10
tailwindcss10
front-end-development10
typescript-types10
html10
typescripts10
react10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
tldraw/tldraw
May 2021 - Jan 2023
whiteboard SDK / infinite canvas SDK
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:736 reviews, 2103 commits, 2130 PRs in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Steve's commits primarily focused on improvements to the tldraw codebase's user interface. They extracted logic from the EditUrlDialog and incorporated it into the bookmark shape utility and cleaned up the embed shape. They are adding more visual elements to the editor components, as well as improving their appearance. These commits show a focus on frontend development and the integration of UI elements.
reactsvgtinysketchwhiteboard
steveruizok/perfect-arrows
Jul 2020 - Jun 2022
Draw perfect arrows between points and shapes.
Role in this project:Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:3 reviews, 88 commits, 41 PRs in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Steve primarily contributed to the front-end development of a project focused on drawing perfect arrows. Their work involved implementing a React application with interactive controls to manipulate arrow properties. The user refactored the core arrow drawing function and updated the example and the visual representation of the arrows within an SVG context.
anglesarrowsperfect-arrowsdrawperfect
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.