About

Hi, I’m Henrique! 👋

I come from a little town in the countryside of Portugal 🇵🇹, and I’ve been living The Netherlands 🇳🇱 for a few years. I’m a software engineer who cares open source, user agency, decentralization, identity, and building impactful tools and products. In my spare time, I enjoy staying physically active, photography, programming, or a nice cup of coffee or tea.

I started playing with computers at an early age. When my father bought his first computer, I carved a monitor, keyboard and mouse from the cardboard boxes and made my own “computer”. As the years passed, I decided to learn programming. I spent hours researching which programming language to learn first and decided on C#. I bought a book, which I never read, and ended up learning PHP instead.

During secondary school, I had the opportunity to write for Pplware, which is one of the largest tech blogs in Portugal. At the same time, I had the opportunity to do some software development work for Upframe, which was the time I started getting introduced to a bit more of the startup world.

After secondary school, in 2017, I moved to Lisbon to pursue a BSc in Computer Science and Engineering at IST. A few months after, I got recruited by Protocol Labs, where I had the opportunity to work on the decentralization of the web in a full open source manner. I am forever grateful for this opportunity.

A few years later, in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, I moved to The Netherlands, where I obtained my MSc in Computer Science and Engineering degree at the TU/e. Moving to a new country - especially during such turbulent times - has given me the opportunity to grow in ways I was not expecting and a new place to call home.

After finishing university, in 2022, I joined Protocol Labs full-time. About a year in, multiple teams spun off, with the goal of long term sustainability. As consequence, I joined the Interplanetary Shipyard with the focus on further decentralizing the web. However, I realized that my interplanetary journey was coming to an end.

Now, I work at Ver.iD, where we’re building a platform to verify and issue verifiable credentials into decentralized identity wallets. On the side, I work on open source projects, usually related to the IndieWeb, or just contributions here and there.

🛠️ Colophon

I started this website back in 2014, when I was just 14. At the time, I was running multiple blogs, in multiple languages. After a while, motivated by the idea of improving my English skills and reduce the amount of websites I was running, I unified all of them under a single roof. The website has also seen quite a few redesigns over the years, but that has not changed as often in the recent times.

For the longest time, this website has been statically-generated by Hugo, but things have changed a few times. In addition to Hugo, there’s Eagle, which is a custom made engine to support additional, more dynamic features, like IndieWeb integrations and the search page.

All the content on this website is produced by me, including photos. It is, by default, copyrighted unless otherwise noted. I do not use LLMs or other AIs to write or generate any of the content of this website. Other tools I use, whether to run this website, or not, can be found in my uses page. I also write often about how this website works.