About Me

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 enjoy learning about new things, taking photographs, and programming. I’m a software engineer 🛠 interested in web infrastructure, decentralized systems, identity, and making tools for developers and users.

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 have been working on decentralizing the web since then.

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.

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.

The (un)interesting story of my handle 🤔

Most likely you’ve already noticed that my handle, @hacdias, reminds of the word ‘hack’. However, I can assure you they have nothing to do with each other. It was a mere coincidence between the first letters of my first name and middle names - ‘hac’ - and last name - ‘dias’ - that I happen to enjoy.