About

Hi 👋, I’m Henrique (he/him)!

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.

In the meanwhile, multiple teams at Protocol Labs nucleated into their own companies with the goal of self-sustainability in the long term. As consequence, I joined the Interplanetary Shipyard, the entity formed by my team and some other related teams, with the goal of further decentralizing the web.

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.

🎩 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.