---
title: Tabrez Syed
description: "I've been shipping software products since 1998, and now I'm relearning the craft with AI in my atelier. I write weekly about AI, and about meditation."
canonical: https://www.mandalivia.com/tabrez-syed/
---

_I build software and I write._

## Building products

*I'm relearning the craft of building products, nearly thirty years after I started.*

I trained as a software engineer and have been shipping products since 1998. I
love the work, and for most of that time the work meant people: hiring them,
organizing them, and getting them to agree on one thing to build.

At Spiceworks I was the first employee and wrote the early code myself. Eleven
years later the company was 400 people and I was head of product, building less
and talking more. After that I started smaller companies of my own in real
estate, personal finance, and data, and found I liked small teams better.

AI makes the team smaller still. Much of what took a department I can now do in
a workshop with a team of agents, so I'm building again. It is a different
skill from the one I spent my career on, and I'm learning it now.

I call the workshop an [atelier](/atelier/).

## Writing

*I write to work out what I think, and lately I've started doing it in public.*

I've kept a blog in some form for years, mostly for myself. What I like about
writing is taking a set of facts, putting them together, and seeing how they
compare with other trends and with history.

The best way to learn is to try. So I've written a
[weekly essay on AI](https://blog.boxcars.ai/) for the past few years, and some
of those essays have also run in
[Towards AI](https://medium.com/towards-artificial-intelligence/off-the-mark-the-pitfalls-of-metrics-gaming-in-ai-progress-races-1139910b8f25),
[The AI Journal](https://aijourn.com/the-three-laws-driving-the-ai-revolution-what-you-need-to-know/),
[Design Bootcamp](https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/ai-is-making-us-rethink-ux-dc9040746d1c),
[Artificial Intelligence in Plain English](https://medium.com/ai-in-plain-english/are-we-there-yet-musings-on-ais-endless-road-trip-fd8590161a05),
and
[Open Data Science](https://opendatascience.com/early-tremors-assessing-generative-ais-emerging-impact-on-jobs-and-incomes/).
For more than a year I also wrote my daughter a [letter each morning](/letters/)
before she left for school. Now I'm writing a book,
[Wobbling Well](https://www.zenist.org/wobbling-well/), about the meditation
I've practiced for twenty-five years.

Most of it doubles as practice for working with AI. Doing the same kind of work
over and over while the technology underneath keeps changing gives me a feel
for the craft.

> [!aside] Why it's called Mandalivia
> When I was eight, I imagined an island that rose out of the Indian Ocean,
> unclaimed by any nation and unknown to every map. I named it Mandalivia. Its
> economy ran on chocolate coins, and its parliament spent its time arguing for
> longer recess. The island stayed in my head until the internet gave it
> somewhere to live. This site is where it lives now: a place to keep the work
> and think out loud.

## Elsewhere

- [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0009-0001-2986-414X) — researcher identifier
- [Google Scholar](https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=ZHZBMG8AAAAJ) — patent and papers
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/tabrez/)
- [X](https://x.com/tabrezsyed)
- [Bluesky](https://bsky.app/profile/mandalivia.com)
- [Mastodon](https://me.dm/@tabrezsyed)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/tabrez-syed)
- [Medium](https://medium.com/@tabrezsyed)
- [DEV Community](https://dev.to/tabrezsyed)
- [Apple Podcasts](https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tabrez-syed-–-essays-on-ai/id6800173696) — Essays on AI, read aloud
- [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/show/0345p7zjUHlUHjdqN0mHmD) — the same show
- [BoxCars](https://blog.boxcars.ai/) — weekly writing on AI
- [Zenist](https://www.zenist.org/) — attention and non-duality
- [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/@tabrez_syed) — photos, free to use
- [US Patent 9,483,791](https://patents.google.com/patent/US9483791B2/en) — named inventor
- [Simple and Flexible Security Systems in Java (1998)](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23166813) — paper, with Michael Dahlin