Austin Bales
Proprietor General at General Impact
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolAustin Bales is a seasoned product design leader and founder with 16 years of experience building consumer-facing experiences and design organizations from the ground up. Based in San Francisco, he led core product design at Instagram and Facebook—co-founding Instagram Labs, launching Threads’ Fediverse features, and shaping company-wide design systems and hiring practices. He combines a pragmatic, common-sense approach with deep technical and product empathy, preferring to guide talented designers through space and honesty rather than strict rules. Now running General Impact, he advises and builds for IT product teams, bringing rare experience in scaling design teams and seeding initiatives that grew into major company efforts. An industrial design and HCI background from Carnegie Mellon underpins his focus on balanced, high-quality outcomes that respect technical constraints.
16 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Industrial Design Design HCI, Industrial Design Design HCI at Carnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
5,486reputation
753kreached
44answers
18questions
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Github Skills (72)
text-editor10
checkbox10
sinatra10
rust-lang9
haml9
css-selectors9
composer9
rack9
css9
checker9
prototyping9
quartz8
switch8
ruby8
php8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
arbales/peopleandrobots.org
Sep 2009 - Jun 2010
Contributions:35 commits in 9 months
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