Giel Cobben
Staff Product Designer at Shopify
Old Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolGiel Cobben is a Staff Product Designer with 11 years of multidisciplinary experience blending design and development, currently shaping product experiences at Shopify from Old Toronto. He has led design teams at Moment and served as Head of Design at Mollie, bringing a track record of scaling design practice across startups and fast-growing product teams. Comfortable shipping both pixels and code, Giel contributes open-source full‑stack projects—like caption—where he implemented React UI, backend integrations, subtitle sources and user preferences. His background spans agency work with WeTransfer and Framer to long-term freelance practice, giving him a pragmatic sensibility for craft, collaboration, and product outcomes. Known for crossing the designer-developer divide, he pairs visual systems thinking with hands-on implementation to accelerate delivery. Outside typical design roles, he often drives technical integrations that improve core product functionality, reflecting a hybrid designer-developer mindset.
11 years of coding experience
10 years of employment as a software developer
Sint Maartens CollegeGraphic Design, Graphic Design at SintLucas
Dutch, English
Stackoverflow
21reputation
3kreached
0answers
5questions
Github Skills (18)
javascript10
ui-components10
web-components10
front-end-development10
frontend10
web-frontend10
react10
electron9
macos8
subtitle8
html6
hash6
firebase6
angularjs6
css6
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
gielcobben/caption
Nov 2016 - May 2022
Get Caption, start watching.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:41 releases, 218 commits, 65 PRs in 5 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Giel primarily refactored and added new features to the application, focusing on both the frontend and backend. They implemented UI components using React, along with logic to handle subtitle downloads. Furthermore, they added features related to settings and language preferences, indicating involvement across multiple aspects of the application. They also integrated several subtitle sources to the app, improving the core function of the app which is downloading subtitles.
captionelectronvttsubtitlesmacos
gielcobben/gielcobben.com
Jan 2019 - Aug 2021
Contributions:6 commits, 6 pushes, 1 branch in 2 years 7 months
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