Ali Al Dallal
I lead the onboarding domain at Tangerine — the systems that turn applicants into customers. Before that: nine years at Scotiabank and three at Mozilla. I build developer tools in the open; lately they are all about working with AI agents without giving up the human gate.
Path
Principal Engineer · Tangerine
Own the onboarding domain — person and business — on the bank's core-platform migration.
Developer → Senior Solutions Architect · Scotiabank
Nine years across engineering and architecture: developer, senior developer, tech lead in the Digital Factory, then solutions architect and senior solutions architect.
Developer & Localization Lead · Mozilla
Started as an intern, stayed full-time. Led localization work and contributed to WebMaker and web captions (vtt.js).
Thailand → Canada
Born in Iraq, raised in Thailand — 18 years there before moving to Canada in 2009. Tutored and worked as a research assistant at Seneca College (2012–2014), and started writing on this domain in 2013.
Building in the open
Mill
Guardrailed agentic workflows on your desktop. Agents and humans work from the same verified view, and every action that reaches outside your machine is previewed and gated before it happens.
clip-harness
A human-in-the-loop execution bridge: a chat model proposes commands, the harness runs them locally behind a review gate, and the result goes back on the clipboard.
react-webpack-babel
The deliberately simple React + Webpack + Babel starter. No Redux, no frameworks, no 250 MB of dependencies — just enough to start, the rest is up to you.
ai.alicoding.com
Notes on building with AI agents — home of the SKILL.md golden-standard research and the patterns behind the tools above.
About
I'm a principal engineer in Toronto who's been shipping software since 2013 — first in open source at Mozilla, then a decade in Canadian banking. The thread through all of it: tools that keep humans in control of what machines do on their behalf.
This site went quiet for a few years while banking ate the calendar. I'm building in public again — the projects above are where that happens now.