Ryan McCuaig

I'm a building architect and software designer living in Vancouver, BC.

I work at The Office of Ryan McCuaig in Vancouver. I have clients who are architects, building envelope engineers, building product manufacturers, non-profits, and housing agencies. I used to work for Acton Ostry Architects and Bruce Carscadden Architect, doing complex renewals of existing institutional buildings.

I'm not sure my specialization is very well-defined yet. But, here's a working definition: Making buildings involves a lot of tedious, irritating, error-prone BS. Quite a lot of that BS lends itself to automation. I automate stuff for money. In practice, this means building out new CAD tools, new database-backed websites, plumbing together data from here to user interfaces over there. Very likely I will be able to deeply empathize with why it’s so irritating if your particular stuff involves architecture. I think the lack of this empathy is why a lot of people hate software, and thus why I hope you won’t hate mine. Hit me up.

I also run. I've started racing kayaks.

What I'm doing now

I'm in Vancouver, working on Thermal Envelope and some custom work in Vectorworks. Racing season is over, so spending time in the gym building strength and doing more distance work. Reading Empires of AI and grudgingly figuring out this LLM jazz via a build-your-own-LLM book club and some futzing about with (sigh) Claude Code.

Last updated: 2025 November 13.