Ryan Olson
Software Builder in Aspen, Colorado
About
I enjoy dreaming about new product ideas and bringing them to life in mobile apps. My focus for the past few years has been on building new sharing spaces including the initial versions of Instagram Stories, IGTV, and Collabs. I am currently building Retro, a friends-only photo journal for moments big and small. I strive to straddle the border between engineering, design, and product. I am most proud of bringing several innovative ideas to the stories format including hold to pause, backwards navigation, and GIF stickers. Later in my time at Instagram, I started and led a group called Instagram Labs to focus on experimental new product development. I also enjoy building open source tools for the iOS developer community. My in-app debugging tool, FLEX, has become one of the most popular iOS projects on GitHub.
Work Experience
Projects
Product Manager. Allowing creators to expand their reach by sharing together.
Engineering Lead. Curated recommendations leveraging the rich visual content of Instagram.
Engineering Lead. 3 week project at the beginning of covid to support those most in need.
iOS Lead. Our shot at making vertical video a thing.
My hackathon project to integrate GIPHY in stories.
Engineering Lead.
iOS Lead. Creator of the hold to pause interaction.
Sole iOS engineer on the interface and icon overhaul.
Side Projects
FLEX is a set of in-app debugging and exploration tools for iOS development. It is the most popular open source iOS debugging tool with over 13K stars on GitHub. I authored this as a side project in 2014 and have continued to evolve it through several major feature additions. FLEX now has an active community of contributors that manage the pull requests, issue reports, and new development.
Awards
US11558211B1 - Collaborative Posts
US20210359969A1 - Social network collections
US11182613B2 - Systems and methods for occluding images and videos subject to augmented-reality effects
US11144099B1 - Systems and methods for providing content
US10929979B1 - Systems and methods for processing content
Three time member (2008, 2010, 2011) competing in several IFSC World Cups