Dan Tennant

WHO#

Principal Engineering Manager at Microsoft, based in Western Pennsylvania. Leading software engineering teams building products used at scale.

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 on a Commodore 64. Wrote my first programs in BASIC with a blinking cursor and 38911 bytes free. Been at it ever since.

FIND ME#