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Windsor, Ontario

Ali Kalakech

I'm a CS graduate and full-stack developer based in Ontario, Canada. I've been coding since I was 12 and I love building and tinkering. I've worked on everything from frontend websites to large backends serving thousands of users.

Most of what I enjoy sits close to the machine — reverse engineering undocumented APIs, making concurrent services hold up under load, and running the infrastructure they sit on. I completed an Honours Bachelor of Computer Science at the University of Windsor in October 2026.

Languages
Go, TypeScript, Python, C++, C#, Java, SQL
Frameworks
GoFiber, Express, React, Next.js, Astro, Flutter, React Native, Tauri, PyTorch
Infrastructure
Docker, Proxmox, NGINX, Linux, AWS, GCP, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis

Work

Undergraduate Research Assistant

Sep 2025 — Present

University of Windsor — Computer Vision

  • Co-authored Insectopedia: An On-Device Mobile Pipeline for Fine-Grained Agricultural Pest Identification, published in IEEE Xplore (FiCloud 2026, IWMA workshop).
  • Built the full inference pipeline to run on-device with zero network dependency, combining YOLO detection, RepViT-SAM segmentation, and group-specific ResNet18 classification.
  • Curated and labelled an 11,768-image dataset spanning 20 species across 9 taxonomic groups.

Software Engineer

Dec 2022 — Present

Contract — Self-employed

  • Owned 20+ projects end-to-end for international clients: requirements and architecture through CI/CD deployment, monitoring, maintenance, and incident response.
  • Built production systems in Go and TypeScript serving thousands of concurrent users.
  • Shipped prototypes and betas early to gather real feedback before committing to larger builds, and handled live incidents under operational pressure.

Honours Bachelor of Computer Science, Applied Computing

Oct 2026

University of Windsor

  • Event Coordinator, UWindsor Cybersecurity ClubSep 2025 — Aug 2026
  • CS Games 2025Lead contributor, Software Engineering track. Quebec, March 2025 — led a 5×3-hour iterative build, defining branching strategy, lightweight CI, and review checklists under time pressure.
  • ICPC East Central North AmericaTeam competitor, November 2024. Graph, dynamic programming, and greedy problems under ACM-ICPC rules.

Projects

Production Data Service

Jul 2024 — Jan 2025

A production data service that replaced an expensive external dependency for a platform serving 30,000+ daily users across 100+ communities.

  • Replaced a USD 5,000+/month external dependency with an in-house service.
  • Rewrote the original TypeScript implementation in Go with GoFiber, cutting response times by roughly 40%.
  • Migrated a live production monorepo by refactoring upstream consumers with zero downtime.
  • Designed resilient, high-throughput request handling to keep throughput stable under load.
  • Go
  • GoFiber
  • TypeScript

Insectopedia

2025 — 2026

An on-device mobile pipeline for identifying agricultural pests in field conditions where the network is unreliable or absent. Published in IEEE Xplore (FiCloud 2026, IWMA workshop).

  • Achieved 86.09% species-level accuracy on 1,524 held-out field images.
  • Chained object detection, segmentation, and group-specific classification entirely on-device, with no network round trip.
  • Added confidence-based routing, resolution retries, and two-pass tiling to survive real field-deployment constraints.
  • Added human-in-the-loop correction logging for difficult cases, working toward an approximately 160-species Ontario target.
  • Flutter
  • YOLO
  • RepViT-SAM
  • ResNet18
  • PyTorch

Paper on IEEE Xplore

Applicant Management Platform

2022

A self-serve applicant portal that collapsed a complex manual onboarding process into login, submission, automated processing, and administrative review.

  • Built and shipped end-to-end: OAuth authentication, multi-step submission workflows, and an RBAC administrative dashboard.
  • Added background job workers for asynchronous workflow automation.
  • Implemented CI/CD with GitHub Actions, then managed cloud deployment, monitoring, and post-launch incident response.
  • Enabled 4,000+ users and contributed to more than USD 150,000 in client revenue through automated onboarding.
  • TypeScript
  • Express
  • MongoDB
  • React
  • OAuth
  • RBAC

Agile Bookstore Platform

Sep — Dec 2025

A bookstore management application built by a 6-person Agile team for COMP-4220 at the University of Windsor.

  • Top contributor on the team, with 70 of 119 commits.
  • Built admin authentication with role checks and sessions, plus an admin panel for user and inventory management and analytics.
  • Automated builds, tests, and tagged releases with GitHub Actions CI/CD (MSBuild, MSTest), plus Azure SQL migrations.
  • C#
  • .NET
  • WPF
  • Azure SQL
  • GitHub Actions

Source on GitHub

Homelab & Self-Hosted Infrastructure

2020 — Present

A personal production environment I've run for six years — the place most of my infrastructure and operations experience actually comes from.

  • Proxmox virtualization running 25+ self-hosted services across Linux VMs and containers.
  • OPNsense networking with mesh VPN access, split-horizon DNS, internal SSL, and reverse proxies.
  • GPU passthrough for local AI inference, plus custom agent tooling built on top of it.
  • Backups, recovery, monitoring, upgrades, and the incident recovery that comes with all of it.
  • Proxmox
  • Docker
  • OPNsense
  • NGINX
  • Linux

Also built

  • Desktop clock overlayAlways-on-top, click-through window with tray integration and a global toggle shortcut. Tauri 2, Rust, React.
  • Real-time marketplace monitorWatches marketplace activity over WebSockets, decodes events, and posts generated image cards to Discord and X.
  • Utility management systemDesktop application over a normalized PostgreSQL schema with stored procedures. C++17, Qt 6, PL/pgSQL.

Contact

Available now for new-grad and early-career software, backend, ML, and platform roles.