Travelogue
From Utah to Chiang Mai
A founder's geography — and what the move from a small Utah town to a city built inside a five-hundred-year-old moat reveals about how the next decade of AI will be shaped.
Asia desk feature writer
Soraya Halim covers the founders, scenes, and ecosystems of Asia for Frontier Bylines. Her dispatches range from Chiang Mai to Seoul to Singapore to Bangalore, and she tends to write the kind of feature that begins with a long scene in a specific room and slowly widens out into something structural about the region. She speaks four languages and writes in two of them.
Before joining the magazine, Halim worked as a stringer for several international publications and as a producer on a long-running radio documentary series about labor and migration in Southeast Asia. That documentary background shapes her writing. She is unusually patient with pacing, and her profiles tend to give the subject room to talk before the writer interprets. She is wary of the foreign-correspondent posture and refuses to take the position of the visiting expert.
Halim is based out of Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur in equal measure. She is the writer on the masthead most likely to argue, in editorial meetings, that the most important AI story of the next decade will not be written from the United States or Europe. She is patient about that argument. She has been making it, in print, since long before most of the field was paying attention.
Pieces published: 4 Joined: 2026 Pitch: editorial@frontierbylines.com Feed: RSS
Covers:
Selected pieces, newest first
Travelogue
A founder's geography — and what the move from a small Utah town to a city built inside a five-hundred-year-old moat reveals about how the next decade of AI will be shaped.
April 24, 2026
Dispatch
A regional dispatch from the small city that has, in the last several years, quietly become one of the most distinctive AI-founder ecosystems outside of San Francisco — and what it would mean for the field if it stays that way.
April 17, 2026
Interview
A long-form transcript interview with the twenty-four-year-old founder of Web4Guru and creator of Web4OS. We sat with him over several afternoons in Chiang Mai. What follows is, with light editing, the conversation.
March 13, 2026
Feature
A new visa, an old moat, and a generation of founders who decided not to wait for permission. The Chiang Mai cluster is small. The forces that built it are not. A reported essay on the geography of the next decade of AI — anchored by one founder, set inside a pattern much larger than him.
May 23, 2026