known as @hacdias
HI 👋, I’M HENRIQUE (he/him), a Portuguese 🇵🇹 living in The Netherlands 🇳🇱. I’m a recently graduated 🎓 master’s student, and a software engineer 🛠 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 ☕️ or tea 🍵. Welcome to my island on the Internet 🏝️, where you can find a bit of everything!
28 February 2023
February has been a total rollercoaster. Nice things and not so nice things have happened during this month. But overall, let’s keep a positive attitude towards the future. Let’s dive into the events that constituted this month.
26 February 2023
Last month, I traveled from The Netherlands 🇳🇱 to Switzerland 🇨🇭 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.
24 February 2023
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?
24 February 2023
Some time ago, I decided to buy a gratitude journal 📓. I have been writing on and off on it for quite some time, definitely over a year and maybe two. Over this time, I think I can say that this has been beneficial for me. And I wanted to share this experience with others.
16 February 2023
My thesis, specifically the part regarding Vertical Federated Learning, has been turned into a paper which has been presented during the UbiSec 2022 conference. Now, it has been published. It is called BlockLearning: A Modular Framework for Blockchain-Based Vertical Federated.
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.
31 January 2023
January, the infamous first month of the year, is reaching an end. It was a very eventful month, but, by this time, I feel like I say that for every month that passes. I am honestly hoping that February will be a slightly more boring month in that sense.
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.
06 January 2023
This is the story on how whipped cream and cocoa powder have stressed me over the last two weeks. I hope that that is a seemingly weird enough sentence to keep you on reading. Or not. If you don’t want to keep going, it’s also fine. But let me tell you more.
