Epidemic Sound

My mother spent her career as an elementary school teacher. She taught kids to read and write, and she also fought, year after year, to get real schools built in the poor suburbs of the city where the council said there was no money. I grew up watching her. The lesson landed in me before I had words for it: there is almost nothing more worth your time than helping a person become what they could be. That is why, before I ever wrote production code for someone else, I became a teacher. Between 2006 and 2015 I taught IT and programming across several high schools and institutes. From 2010 to 2014 I founded and ran two educational institutes where we trained roughly 1,200 students in IT, Accounting, and Architectural Drafting. I have balanced code and classrooms for twenty years, most of it as an Engineer or Team Lead / Tech Lead, and the last 6-7 years building search and AI systems at Epidemic Sound in Stockholm. Outside of code I carve wood ( https://mirage-art.com ), and I run a small YouTube channel for developers navigating a move to Sweden ( https://lnkd.in/djdg8twe ). The part of me that lights up has not changed. I love watching someone grow into the thing they thought was out of reach. For most of those years I kept running into the same wall. One good mentor can change a person's whole trajectory. I have met a hundred people who could have been changed by one, and almost none of them ever got one. The math has always been wrong. AI is the first thing that makes the math different. So I built Porvelo. It tells you, every day, the next concrete piece of work to do to get where you want to be. An AI mentor sits with you whenever you have a minute, asks why before it answers, and pushes you the way a good senior would. A human mentor comes in to course-correct and meet you directly. Your finished work goes on a public profile, in the order you did it, as proof. The product is live. I am not opening it widely yet. The first cohort is 10 people: • 5 from tech (engineers, PMs, data, anyone shipping software) • 5 from any other field where you want to build credibility through real work, not credentials (writing, design, marketing, research, anything) You get 30 days of free access. In exchange I ask three things: ship at least one task a week, be open to a short call if I reach out with questions, and tell me what is broken without softening it. If that is you, the form is here: https://porvelo.com/apply Not selling a course. Not selling a bootcamp. Trying to make the thing my mother would have wanted to exist for her students, and finding the right ten people to break it with me first. Erfan :)

The Epidemic Sound on Tour exhibition is live at NAB Show Las Vegas! This is the first time we're rolling out the On Tour experience in the US. As I've said before, it's "not your average expo booth", and if you're there, you should definitely stop by and chat with my colleagues Cecilia Munthe , Alexander Mavlios and Mei O'Brien ! Thanks for a great collab NAB crew! Gigi Raskin and Robin Raskin and my production team at The Manual 🤝