Thijs van As

I love creating products I genuinely want to use myself, and sweating the details until they feel right.

Right now that’s Relay.app, where we’re making AI workflows simple and accessible. Previously I built products at Google working on Gmail, Google Flights, and Google Maps, and led product for Booking.com’s mobile app.

Below are some of my favorite things I’ve built over the years, professionally and for fun.

Shipped

• Google Flights: Price Insights (2018) · Introduced the ML-based “low/typical/high” pricing UI to help users answer a simple question: “Is this a reasonable price?”. This pattern has since become standard across much of the travel industry.
  CNN · video

• Gmail Add-ons (2016) · A cross-platform framework that lets third-party apps live natively inside Gmail. We focused on developer simplicity and making a consistent “native” user experience across iOS, Android, and the web.
  blog · video

• Inbox by Gmail: Smart Bundles (2015) · We wanted to treat related emails as “items” rather than individual messages, and shipped dedicated experiences for Trips, Newsletters, Events, GitHub repos, and more.
  trips · newsletters · 3p bundles

• Gmail Attachments (2013) · The attachment experience still used in Gmail today. To make it feel truly instant, we focused on getting the viewer to load in under 150ms while deeply integrating Google Drive and Photos.
  Drive · Photos

FPGA

Before moving into product, I spent a lot of time in the weeds of VHDL and reconfigurable hardware.

• ρ-VEX (2008) · An open source, extensible VLIW CPU. I designed and implemented the processor and its toolchain, including the ρ-ASM assembler, for my MSc thesis.
  repo · thesis · paper · citations

• uart-vhdl (2008) · A minimal RS232 communication controller. Couldn’t live without this for debugging other projects.
  repo

• arkanoid-vhdl (2007) · A basic implementation of Arkanoid entirely in hardware, from the VGA signal generation to the collision physics.
  repo · video

• MIDI synthesizer (2007) · A simple monophonic MIDI synthesizer to experiment with digital audio synthesis.
  video

HTML5 games

A collection of HTML5 games I built around 2010, when the canvas element was brand new. They still play great on modern browsers. The source code for all of them is on GitHub.

• BrickIt (2010) · Arkanoid-style brick breaker, took 2nd prize at HTML5Contest.com
• BounceIt (2011) · Endless vertical jumper
• FloodIt (2010) · Color flood puzzle
• SweepIt (2010) · Minimalist Minesweeper
• SnakeIt (2017) · A tribute to the Nokia classic, built during a transatlantic flight

Misc

• Resistor - Lights of Yesterday (2005) · EP from my former metal band