Go where the work happens.
Visiting medical facilities made the back office legible in a way another round of virtual outreach never could. Proximity changes the quality of the questions.
Nemath Ahmed · San Francisco
Notes on building, health, and learning.
I’m a co-founder of Shifu Health. I write to make sense of the work: what we learn from people, what changes while building, and the ideas worth keeping.
research and technical work
- Georgia Tech
- Intel
- Emory
- Cisco
- DARPA
- TU Dresden
- IIT Indore
- NTU Singapore
- NUS
selected writing
Essays
- Graduating Georgia Tech School, building a company, boxing, music, and learning to live with uncertainty.
- What’s a data platform, anyway? A plain-language look at how data moves, gets shaped, and becomes useful.
- The art of reading a research paper A practical method for slowing down and finding the actual idea.
- How AI-based fitness trackers work Movement data, one-dimensional neural networks, and activity recognition.
working notes
From the work
Build alongside people.
Collecting requirements once and disappearing to build is not customer discovery. Keep the feedback loop open while the product is still easy to change.
Work backwards from tonight.
When a problem expands, return to the deadline: if this needs to work tonight, what must happen right now? Urgency can be clarifying when the outcome is concrete.
creative
Films, photographs, and music live separately.
The visual and musical work has its own room, away from the writing archive.
enter the creative section