Al Abbas

Work

Three projects.

Product systems, trust tooling, and developer education.

01

Projects

Challenge, approach, and outcome.

MATTR

Product system

Fern

A platform that lets people across the company generate Web Verifier SDK-backed credential verification demos in a few prompts, without hand-coding or a separate deployment step.

Challenge

Demo work only looks simple from a distance. I had already built these Web Verifier SDK demos manually by the dozens, usually under time pressure, so I knew exactly how much repetitive judgement, setup, and deployment friction was hiding in the process.

Approach

That manual experience was the edge. Because I knew the verifier flow intimately, I could collapse it into one system that generated demo assets, wired them into the MATTR Web Verifier SDK, hosted the result directly, and removed the old gap between producing a demo and getting it live. Building Fern also meant pushing hard into the current agentic AI stack: tools, software development kits, and frontier models, then figuring out what could actually hold up in a product.

Outcome

Fern changed who could create demos. Commercial and product teams could produce SDK-backed verifier demos themselves, turning work that used to require product engineering time into a self-service flow that usually completes within minutes.

MATTR

Trust tooling

VICAL Viewer

Trust tooling for ISO 18013-5 work: VICAL inspection, PEM certificate utilities, and Issuing Authority Certificate Authority validation.

Challenge

Verified Issuer Certificate Authority Lists (VICALs), PEM-encoded certificates, and Issuing Authority Certificate Authority (IACA) validation all matter in the ISO 18013-5 ecosystem, but they are hard to reason about when the only thing in front of you is an encoded artifact.

Approach

The tools gave people a way in. Instead of staring at opaque certificate and trust-list data, they could inspect the structure, see what was there, and build a clearer mental model of what they were working with.

Outcome

The VICAL Viewer, PEM tool, and IACA Validator became practical infrastructure for people working through ISO 18013-5 trust material. They were used inside MATTR by engineering and QA, and externally by implementers and ecosystem participants including the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators (AAMVA), Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) stakeholders, Austroads, New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (DIA), Digital Identity Services Trust Framework contributors, jurisdictions, and digital identity specialists. Biometric Update covered the VICAL Viewer, but the bigger signal was that people kept reaching for it in meetings because it made opaque trust-list and certificate material inspectable.

MATTR

Developer education

MATTR Learn

Built React Native holder and verifier tutorials, iOS/Android sample apps, and a documentation chat experience that made the platform easier to learn and search.

Challenge

A platform can have strong capabilities and still feel hard to approach. Mobile credential workflows make that sharper: people need to understand the SDK, the device flow, and the credential model at the same time.

Approach

I worked on both sides of that problem: React Native tutorials and sample apps for holder and verifier mobile credential SDK flows, and a documentation chat experience built on AWS-backed retrieval over the platform's docs and reference material.

Outcome

Working on the documentation site let me provide practical mobile tutorials and iOS/Android sample apps, and add chat-backed retrieval so people could ask the docs a question directly.