About

Hi 👋, I’m Henrique!

I’m from a little town in the countryside of Portugal 🇵🇹 and now I live in The Netherlands 🇳🇱. I’m a software engineer 🛠 who cares about the web, decentralization, identity, user agency, and making impactful tools for developers and users. In my spare time, I enjoy cycling, taking photographs, programming, or a nice cup of coffee or tea.

Since an early age, I have been curious about computers and I always wanted to work with them, albeit initially I did not understand what that involved. As the years passed by, I used the Internet to satisfy my curiosity and learn more and more about computers. Initially, I researched hours and hours about which programming language I should learn first and, at the time, I decided that C# was the right choice and bought a book. Turns out, I never read said book and ended up learning PHP instead. I’ve heard that PHP has come a long way since I first learned it!

During secondary school, I had the opportunity to write for Pplware, which is one of the largest, if not the largest, tech blog in Portugal. I wrote over 400 tutorials, tech news and other articles. In addition, I published a 60 page e-book on how to program in C for beginners at the age of 15. Furthermore, I had the opportunity to do some software development work at Upframe where I met some amazing people.

After secondary school, I moved to Lisbon in order to pursue a BSc in Information Systems and Computer Engineering. I spent three years studying at IST, where I met amazing people during my stay. At the same time, I got recruited for Protocol Labs, where I had the opportunity to work on further decentralizing the web.

Against all odds - call it the pandemic 🦠 - I moved to the Netherlands to pursue a MSc in Computer Science and Engineering at TU/e, which is nearly complete. Sadly, in two years of university, I only had the opportunity to have one course on campus. After defending my thesis on-campus, I successfully completed my Master’s degree.

During my time at TU/e, I was a student mentor, where I mentored 12 new master students from different nationalities during their first semester in The Netherlands. In addition, I was a Teaching Assistant for the Deep Learning course, where I prepared materials, gave practical classes and helped students.

Later, multiple teams at Protocol Labs nucleated into their own companies with the goal of long term self-sustainability. As consequence, I joined the Interplanetary Shipyard with the goal of further decentralizing the web. However, I realized shortly after that my journey in the interplanetary technologies was coming to an end.

These experiences were driven by my belief in transparency and openness, in a united Europe 🇪🇺 and that we all deserve equal rights 🏳️‍🌈. There are a lot of issues in the world and we are all part of them, and we all should work towards correcting them, making Earth a better place for all of us to live.

Why @hacdias? I’ve been asked before if there’s any relation between my handle, @hacdias, and the verb “to hack”. The answer is quite boring: there is not. It is simply the initials of some of my names with my last name.

🎩 Colophon

I started this website in 2014, when I was 14. At the time, all the content was in Portuguese, and I was running multiple blogs. After a while, I decided to start writing in English hoping it would improve my English skills, which I can argue that worked. Nowadays, all other blogs I had are merged under the current domain.

This website has seen quite a few redesigns. I wrote about all the main designs I had before this website was part of the IndieWeb community, and after. I am still not 100% settled on the current design. However, major changes are slowing down, which means I might be coming to a good point where I am mostly satisfied.

With the exception from a few pages, this website is statically-generated by Hugo, my favorite website generator. This website has been generated by Hugo since 2015, except during a short period between November 2021 and April 2023. During this period, I was running my own custom backend, called Eagle. Eagle still backs dynamic portions of this website, such as the search results.

This website currently relies on a bunch of services, such as Hetzner, Cloudflare and Bunny. I would like to move out of Cloudflare in the future due to their latest historic with down time. However, I haven’t spent some time doing that yet. Other software I use can be found in my uses page.