Dan Tennant

WHO#

Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, based in Western Pennsylvania. I lead several engineering teams in Azure Observability, focused on our ingestion pipelines, which handle telemetry streams that scale to exabytes of data every day.

INTERESTS#

I’m interested in AI systems broadly — how they work, how to build with them effectively, and what it means for the people and organizations using them. Topics I expect to write about:

  • Mechanistic interpretability — learning to reverse-engineer the internal algorithms of neural networks, with an eye toward what this means for AI safety
  • Agentic AI — how to use agent capabilities well, where they work, and where they fail
  • Engineering leadership — building and scaling software teams in a world where the tools are changing fast
  • Broader impact — how AI will reshape work, society, and what it means to build software

BACKGROUND#

Started coding in the mid-80s on a Commodore 64. Wrote my first programs in BASIC with a blinking cursor and 38911 bytes free. Graduated to BBSes, then to the internet back when we wrote HTML by hand. Got my degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and have been in the software industry ever since.

FIND ME#