Erfan Tahriri projects about

Erfan Tahriri

I'm a senior software engineer at Epidemic Sound in Stockholm, where I work on search and discovery infrastructure. Before Stockholm I spent most of my life in Iran.

On the side I'm building Porvelo, an AI mentorship platform built around one problem: finding a great mentor is rare luck, and it shouldn't be. You get a personal AI coach that builds on your work over time and learns how you think. Human expert sessions are bookable. Proof of work, on record, is built in.

Before engineering I taught. I ran two educational institutes in Iran between 2006 and 2015 and trained roughly 1,200 students across IT, accounting, and technical drawing. Teaching is where I developed most of what I think about mentorship: that the goal is to make yourself unnecessary, that struggle is part of learning, and that hand-holding produces dependence rather than capability.

I also carve wood, under the name Mirage Art. Each piece starts from a feeling that needed a physical form. The work is about memory, distance, what passes through hands. I've been at it for eight years, out of a small studio in Solna.

What I write about

Engineering at scale, mostly Go and Python. AI agents in production, which is different from AI agents in demos. Distributed systems, search infrastructure, zero-downtime migrations. What it actually looks like to build a product solo. The gap between credentials and craft. Life in Stockholm as an immigrant engineer. Wood carving and what making something slowly teaches you about yourself.

The common thread: I write to think clearly. The topics change. The way of looking doesn't.

Elsewhere