HI πŸ‘‹, I’M HENRIQUE (he/him), a Portuguese πŸ‡΅πŸ‡Ή living in The Netherlands πŸ‡³πŸ‡±. I’m a recently graduated πŸŽ“ master’s student, and a software engineer πŸ›  interested in web infrastructure, decentralized systems, identity, and making tools for developers and users. I enjoy learning about new things, taking photographs, playing badminton, programming, as well as a nice cup of coffee β˜•οΈ or tea 🍡. Welcome to my island on the Internet 🏝️, where you can find a bit of everything!

🌻 Latest Posts

26 February 2023

A Deutsche Bahn Tale on ICE

Last month, I traveled from The Netherlands πŸ‡³πŸ‡± to Switzerland πŸ‡¨πŸ‡­ by train. More specifically, I traveled from Eindhoven to Engelberg, which is a small alpine town in the centre of Switzerland. When I wrote this post for the first time, it was mostly a rant, but now that some time has passed, I decided to rewrite it and finally publish it.

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24 February 2023

Engelberg Captures

Last month I had the opportunity of visiting Engelberg, in Switzerland. During this small trip, I spent some quality time with my coworkers and took some pictures. Below are my favourites. I had to include two trains, because… why not?

Since Twitter is going to start charging for the usage of their API in a few days, I just removed all the Twitter related code from my website. To be fair, I haven’t even used any Twitter-relating tooling on my website in months, so it’s unlikely I will miss it.

In the beginning of the month, I wrote about being a foreigner in the country you’re living in, and the struggles we have to find ingredients to make dishes from our home country. It can be so frustrating! And well… it happened again!

Yesterday, I was making Arroz Doce 🍚, which literally translates to “sweet rice”. It is a Portuguese rice-pudding-like dessert. It asks for arroz carolino, which is a rice only cultivated in Portugal. That would be quite hard to find, so I checked a Dutch recipe and they said I could use dessert rice instead. I tried it, the taste is there, but the consistency is very far away from what I expected. The grains are so much smaller and it’s barely noticeable it is rice. Next time it’ll be better!

Also, fun fact: Portugal has the highest rice consumption in Europe and we cultivate our own rice. You can read more about it if you’re interested.

Albert Heijn, the largest chain of supermarkets in The Netherlands, is notorious for not accepting debit cards that aren’t Maestro or V-Pay. This is due to the Dutch system only using Maestro and V-Pay, instead of Mastercard of Visa. Fortunately, Maestro and V-Pay are going to be deprecated in a few months, and therefore merchants have to start accepting Mastercard and Visa.

Yesterday, I was at Albert Heijn and I had a feeling. I decided to try my Portuguese debit card, which, being Visa, has always been rejected at Albert Heijn. I was pleasantly surprised when it worked. That is some progress.