Ali Almossawi
Thoughtful products that blend engineering, design, and storytelling. I empower teams to ship beautiful, intuitive tools that automate developer workflows and increase productivity.
Outside of work, I build for fun and write to inform. I've had the privilege of mentoring up-and-coming engineers and designers through office hours, as part of the MIT Alumni Advisors Hub.
My illustrated books on critical thinking have reached 3.5+ million readers across 23 languages. My data visualizations have reached millions of people.
Leadership begins from the heart, and from a place of sincerity. There's nothing that matters to me more than lightening the burden of every person who depends on me.
Studied at MIT (MS) and Carnegie Mellon (MS); senior and leadership roles at Apple, Sony, Mozilla, and the MIT Media Lab; conducted research at MIT and Harvard.
For inquiries about Bad Choices, contact Seth Fishman. For inquiries about the print editions of Bad Arguments or Loaded Language, contact Karen Giangreco. ali@almossawi.com for everything else.
I meet people where they are, and make no apologies for taking a chance on them. Everyone in this world is, in a sense, also me.
Led engineering teams at Apple, ran a design company, nearly launched a chocolate company, bound books, and write 10K words a week.
A track record of delivering polished internal and customer-facing web products with top CSATs.
Spent the past year building apps that help automate analog things like bookshelves with Gemini, Veo 3, Codex, and other LLMs and agents.
Writer and data visualization specialist with 400K+ book sales and 7K readers on Substack. Recently finished a manuscript for a debut novel.
People I've worked with
One of the best leaders I've come across. Ali is not only dedicated to his work as an engineer and manager, but he also brings this genuine empathy and vision that make him a standout. Ali has an incredible knack for solving tough problems creatively and has this inspiring ability to think outside the box. He’s easy to work with, down-to-earth, and really cares about his team’s growth and well-being.
Software Engineering Manager, Apple
I worked with Ali on UX/UI efforts for machine learning infrastructure. Impressed across the board with [Ali's] ability to distill deep technical issues with concise questions that drove everyone to alignment. I heartily recommend Ali to be a part of any organization or project that requires a critical thinker who cares and implements clean, well‑designed solutions that solve key problems.
Engineering Program Manager, Apple
New experiments
Check Yo Shelf
Upload a photo of your physical bookshelf and get a digital version of it in a few seconds! In early access as of June 2025. Learn more.
Silicon Valley Language Guide
An interactive guide to Silicon Valley vernacular through 100 playing cards. Tap, flip, and share! Learn more.
Bookshelf Buddy
Ever had trouble finding a book on a bookshelf? Snap photos of your bookshelves and have Bookshelf Buddy create searchable copies of them for you. Learn more.
Goat & Bear
Animated, musical shorts on logical fallacies, cognitive biases, and critical thinking. Learn more.
Work that's mostly writing based
The Critical Thinker Newsletter
Practical ideas every other Thursday to help you become a better critical thinker. 43+ longform essays. Launched in June 2023. Subscribe now.
An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language
Learn to hear what's left unsaid in the subtle ways news headlines and various other forms of language influence our thinking. Out in print in November 2021. Order the print edition.
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments
A book on critical thinking that explains a set of common errors in reasoning, described by Hope Jahren as “a book every scientist should have.” Read it online or in print!
Bad Choices
An illustrated introduction to computational thinking, described by Vint Cerf as “one of the more clever ways of introducing computational thinking to the general public.” Take a look.
Hans in the Land of Bards
The opening part of a novella about an absentminded tailor and his quick-witted accomplice struggle to escape a land where things aren't always what they seem. Take a look.
The Point of Pointless Work
A reflection on five years in publishing, and the transformative power of hobbies. A book I wrote for my mailing list, published by Cormorant Press. Take a look.
Amaranta
A picture book for grown-ups that explores separation anxiety and empathy. Still a work in progress. Take a look.
How Maintainable is Firefox?
By appealing to the explanatory powers of five practical measures of architectural complexity, this work explores the quality of the Firefox codebase. Take a look.
Design and data visualization work
Developer experience tools
Buttery smooth visualizations, functional interactives, and beautiful, sticky developer products, built over a span of 7 years. My Apple work is proprietary. For a demo of shareable parts, please reach out.
The Web We Want: Firefox 29
A real-time visualization of the global community that powers Mozilla, visited by 10 million visitors. My contributions were designing and coding the map and stats page. Take a look.
The Big Five US Trade Book Publishers and Their Imprints
A darling of the publishing industry. Editors and VPs from all major publishers have contributed edits to it. Referenced in Publishers Weekly. Take a look.
Flying Over Data in VR
What would visualizing geographic data in virtual reality look like? Would it be compelling? Would it be insightful? A little experiment using the open-source tools A‑Frame and D3. Take a look.
Firefox Hardware Report
The first ever public report of the hardware used by Firefox users. The report's data can be used by developers to improve the experience of Web users. Take a look.
MetricsGraphics.js
A D3-based library that's optimized for visualizing and laying out time-series data in a principled way—600,000 hits, 7,100 GitHub stars, top 1% of most-starred projects. Take a look.
Pantheon
A project by the Macro Connections group at the Media Lab that I had the good fortune of co-developing and designing. Pantheon visualizes global culture using cultural icons of note. Take a look.
Technical Debt in Firefox and Chromium
A quantitative comparison of two complex software systems, using prose and a visual inspired by a story from Greek mythology. Take a look.
How Educated are World Leaders?
A descriptive visualization of the education levels of world leaders, from 1950 or thereabouts to the present day. Visited by 100,000 visitors. Take a look.
Bahrain: Two Years On
Shortlisted in the 2013 Information is Beautiful Awards, this visualization impartially depicts the casualties of the conflict in Bahrain, abstracted to take the form of a palm tree. Take a look.
Evolution of the Firefox Codebase
A visualization that presents a set of metrics for all releases of Firefox that are indicative of quality and allows one to inspect them through one of several views. Take a look.
The Observatory of Economic Complexity
A tool by Alex Simoes and the Macro Connections group at the MIT Media Lab that I had the good fortune of designing the first version of. Take a look.
Other stuff
Smaller works and experiments
- Plain English: A Cheat Sheet of Things to Be Wary Of (2019)
- Which Universities Did Popular British Comedians Go To? (2019)
- Browser Usage as Planets (2012)
- Participie: Direct online participation using interactive visualization (2012)
Publications
- An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language (North America), published by Experiment Books
- The Point of Pointless Work, published by Cormorant Press
- Bad Choices (North America), published by Viking
- Bad Choices (UK and Commonwealth), published by John Murray
- Don't Just Teach Kids How to Code, Teach Them Algorithms, Too; Bright
- How Algorithmic Thinking Can Help You Think Smarter, Change This
- Logic: In the Direction of Truth, Imagine Magazine—The Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth
- An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments (North America), published by The Experiment, distributed by Workman
- An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments (UK and Commonwealth), published by Scribe Publications, distributed by Penguin Books and Macmillan
- Book chapter: Visualizing ambiguity in an era of data abundance and very large engineering systems, New Challenges for Data Design, edited by David Bihanic, published by Springer-Verlag (London)
- The Data Visualization Revolution, co-authored with Cesar Hidalgo, Scientific American
- Going Beyond the One-Bit Democracy, co-authored with Cesar Hidalgo, Wired (UK)
- Analysis Tool Evaluation: Coverity Prevent, co-authored with Kelvin Lim and Tanmay Sinha, Carnegie Mellon
- MetricsGraphics.js - a lightweight graphics library built on D3, Mozilla Hacks
Interviews and talks
- Podcast: Thinking in Algorithms: My Conversation with Ali Almossawi [The Knowledge Project Ep. #38]
- Podcast: The Importance of Discipline; CEO Journals with Ethan Bridge
- Podcast: Arguments, Bad Arguments, and side projects; Young and Profiting
- Hidden gems do exist, meet Ali Almossawi, a Bahraini engineer working at Apple, author, and publisher; Startup MGZN
- Podcast: Using Algorithms to Make Better Decisions, Sidestepping Logical Fallacies and How To Think More Critically; Metalearn
- Video: This Week in Tech
- How to Use Algorithms to Solve Everyday Problems, MIT Sloan
- Video: D3 in Practice, SFHTML5 Meetup, Google, San Francisco (Slides)
- Video: Open-Sourcing the Creative Process, SDM Systems Thinking Series
- Informing with Design, Greylock Partners Design Group
- Audio: A conversation with ABC Radio about critical thinking and the art of making sense
- Ali Almossawi: Technical, Entrepreneurial, and Creative Mojo; MIT
- Talk at Links 2013 (MIT Media Lab) on measuring quality in complex software systems
- Video: Hosting guest speaker Cesar Hidalgo at Mozilla's Mountain View office
An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments in the press
- This Short Book Makes You Smarter Than 99 Percent of the Population, Inc.com
- How to be a human lie detector of fake news, according to the latest science, CNN.com
- Why smart people believe coronavirus myths, BBC.com
- Summer Reading For The College-Bound, NPR
- A Finnish article on teaching children about logical arguments, yle.fi
- In the Mailbag: BEA 2015 Edition, Book Riot
- Eight Cousins Pick of the Year 2014
- San Diego Book Review
- Hones Of Contention, The Common Reader
- A Fun Primer on How to Strengthen, Not Weaken, Your Arguments; Open Culture
- Now More Than Ever, You Need This Illustrated Guide To Bad Arguments, Faulty Logic, And Silly Rhetoric; Fast Company
- Teach Your Kids Logic With An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments by Jenny Williams, GeekDad
- 9 Charming Cartoons Explaining Logical Fallacies, BuzzFeed
- Bad arguments, great illustrations by Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing
- This Little Piggy Made A Logical Error, The Dish
- A guide to fallacious arguments, illustrated with funny animals; io9
- National Indie Bestsellers - Extended Hardcover Nonfiction
- Southern Indie Bestseller List
- Book review: 'Bad Arguments' will entertain, help you diagnose poor logic; Omaha.com
- Book review: Tripping Over Logic, The Philosophy Club
- The Lost Art of Making Sense, ABC Radio
- New hardcover books teach kids through superheroes, gaming, art; Denver Post
- Greenville Public Library review
- How to argue, with others and yourself; Andreessen Horowitz Weekend Newsletter
- Shelf Awareness starred review
- Appearance in Page Turners, submitted by Ellen at The Griswold Inn Store
Bad Choices in the press
- This Week in Tech
- Review in New Scientist, From statistics to surgery to psychology: Our favourite reads
- Bad Choices: How Algorithms Can Help, Slice of MIT
- Bad Choices to John Murray
- Web guru signs for John Murray
An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language in the press
- Review on GeekMom.com by Jenny Bristol
- How to Recognize the Weasley, Smarmy, and Otherwise Loaded Language That People Use Against You; Lifehacker
Mentions and various other things
- Managing and visualizing big data by Meredith Somers, MIT Sloan
- Finally, a Handy Chart of the Big Five Book Publishers and Their Imprints; Tor
- Mozilla Firefox Hardware Report, SD Times
- Most Firefox users are running Windows 7 on dated PCs, Engadget
- Do-Not-Track Talks Could Be Running Off the Rails by Natasha Singer, New York Times
- What The World Wants From The Future Web As The FCC Looks To Shut The Door On Net Neutrality
- Evidence-based Software Engineering
- MIT $100K 2012 semi-finalist
- Weather doesn't affect ice cream consumption, Harvard Gazette
- Stewart Lee . . . has let himself go
- Interview with Behance CEO Scott Belsky
Personal writings
- A Wisp of Smoke
- Identity
- Measuring Code Quality (or What Does the Fox Weigh?)
- Five Ideas for Achieving Clarity in Data Visualization
- Open-Sourcing the Creative Process
- A Beautiful Night
- Shorty by Mikhail Naima, translated into English
- Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, translated into Arabic
Brief biographical statement Ali Almossawi is the bestselling author of An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments, as well as the books An Illustrated Book of Loaded Language, Bad Choices, and The Point of Pointless Work. His books have reached 3.5 million readers, translated into 23 languages, and have sold over 400,000 copies in print. He is an alumnus of MIT and Carnegie Mellon. He led engineering and product design teams at Apple for 7.5 years, including work on developer tools for Apple Intelligence and visionOS.
Download headshot 1, or headshot 2 (no copyright, public domain).
