Writings

Hello 👋 Today’s newsletter is a bit different (and smaller) than most. I have been quite busy during the past week and this week as well. Starting tomorrow, I’m having three three hour exams this week that count 100% towards my final grade. I don’t even know if this should be allowed.

“Test, test, test” is a well known sentence right now due to the current circumstances. However, it does not apply only to Covid-19 or other diseases. Testing is one word that all of us have dreamt - or had nightmares - about in the past. It is also one crucial part and step in the Software Engineering and Development process, as it allows to verify and ensure that a certain system behaves as expected. At least, for known cases!

My website is growing, not in terms of views, because I’m not aware of that. Maybe I should add some non-intrusive analytics. Anyways, it’s growing in terms of functionality. However, since I’m using a static website generator, it makes it complicated to add some interactive functionalities.

I’m now in my first year of my Master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering which means that next year I am supposed to start (and hopefully finish) my Master’s project and thesis. As a consequence of that, I have been thinking a lot about it lately. I don’t want to make a rushed choice that will make me work on something I don’t enjoy for over half an year.

Today’s the first day of a new month, so here’s a new “recently” post. Since I decided to start this series after mid-september, there’s not that many news since. However, I’m more than happy to write a few words about what’s been happening lately.

It’s been a little bit over a month since I first arrived in Eindhoven. Since then, I have had time to explore the city, a bit of Rotterdam, and even find a Portuguese store with “Pastéis de Nata” in Helmond! I have also had time to study, but had to decrease my time at Protocol Labs due to my studies. With all of this, I haven’t had time to give much love to my blog.

We are living in an increasingly interconnected world. Today, 4.1 billion people have access to the internet. And with every passing year, millions more are born into the world as “digital natives” with digital technology and the World Wide Web at their fingertips from early childhood.

Last night before going to sleep… well actually while falling asleep I thought about writing this. It’s such a basic poem, but lemme just share it here.

Over the past months, I have been reading more and more posts where people are saying they miss the vibe of the 90s web. Even though I wasn’t alive to see how that web was, I still remember the website of my high school filled with overly saturated colors, GIFs and iframes. Not only that characterizes some of the pages of the early web, but also the pixelation and the footers saying to use X or Y browser.

I decided to make a few updates on my website - again. However, this are a bit more than visuals and I’m mostly reinventing the way I manage IndieWeb posts, namely likes, reposts, notes and replies.

For quite a few time, I used Bear as my go-to Notes application for two reasons: it was simple to use and the syntax was quite similar to markdown. However, it is not markdown and it does not support some things that’d like to see on such software: diagrams, mathematics, wiki-like links, etc.

Today, I decided to readd a watches page, but this time it isn’t built from hundreds of posts, but from the data that I get directly from Trakt’s API. I built a small tool called trakt-collector used to collect your history and save it in JSON format.

For quite some time, I have been getting more and more into the IndieWeb world and trying to own my own data. I have started publishing more to my website and using it as a place to store most of my public data, i.e., data I already published on other social media and platforms.

As Tom once said, it is now time to own my own reading log. Why? Despite all the reasons mentioned on Tom’s post, I also got bored of Goodreads and I ended up not using it as much as I should have.

In 2015, I started a project called http.hugo, which was a just a simple plugin for Caddy, a really fast web server built with Go with automatic HTTPS. At the time, the plugin was exclusive for Caddy and it provided a simple UI to edit your files in the server, rebuild the website and so on. They were just simple features.