Canvas Flow
Infinite canvas, live collaboration, and a smart drawing engine. Built end to end.
Industry
Productivity & Collaboration Tools
Scope of work
Full-Stack Development
Duration
a week
Challange
Building real-time collaboration on a shared canvas means high-frequency sync, live cursors, coordinate transforms, and undo/redo — all working together, or the whole experience breaks.
Real-time collaboration on a shared canvas is one of the hardest UI problems to get right. High-frequency pointer events, live sync across users, coordinate transformations, and undo/redo history all have to work together seamlessly — or the whole experience falls apart.
Goal
Building a collaborative canvas from scratch meant solving problems most developers never encounter.
Build a production-grade collaborative whiteboard from scratch — infinite canvas, multi-user presence, and a smart drawing engine that converts rough sketches into clean geometry automatically.
Solution
Every architectural decision was made to keep the experience fast and consistent under real collaborative load.
Designed a unified canvas data model in React and TypeScript, with Supabase handling auth, persistence, and real-time sync. Built Smart Draw on top of shape-recognition and path-simplification algorithms to bridge freeform sketching and precise diagramming. Every architectural decision was made to keep the experience fast and consistent under real collaborative load.
