Writings

May is now approaching its end and the birds 🕊️ are chirping, filling the air with spring noises. Summer is almost there. There have been quite a few nice things to look back in this month. Let’s go.

Today, I visited the Spoorwegmuseum, which literally translates to Railway Museum. As you can imagine, many historical wagons 🚃 and locomotives 🚂. This is among my all-time favorite museums. Last year, when I visited for the first time, I forgot my camera. In addition, I did not manage to visit everything. Now, I was back and with a camera and more time.

It is, yet again, that time of the month to write a bit about what’s been happening lately. April went by relatively fast and it was quite packed with some events, both regarding personal and work life. In addition, the weather is definitely getting so much better than a few months ago.

Recently, I have been working with Open Telemetry tracing at work, namely on adding tracing support to multiple web services in order to understand where time is being spent. Since it has been quite an interesting experience, I decided it could be a great idea to write about it, with a tiny demo.

March is almost gone and here we are again, at one more recap of what has happened over the last month. Compared to February, March has been a pretty eventless month, at least on the surface.

I haven’t written a single article this month. However, I’ve thought about doing so quite a few times. Despite that, none of the articles I have in my drafts section felt exciting enough to complete. But today I was talking to a friend and I remembered this story I’ve told a few friends of mine. It’s the story of the time I “hacked” my school’s library computers. Hacked… with quotes.

February has been a total rollercoaster. Nice things and not so nice things have happened during this month. But overall, let’s keep a positive attitude towards the future. Let’s dive into the events that constituted this month.

Last month, I traveled from The Netherlands 🇳🇱 to Switzerland 🇨🇭 by train. More specifically, I traveled from Eindhoven to Engelberg, which is a small alpine town in the centre of Switzerland. When I wrote this post for the first time, it was mostly a rant, but now that some time has passed, I decided to rewrite it and finally publish it.

Some time ago, I decided to buy a gratitude journal 📓. I have been writing on and off on it for quite some time, definitely over a year and maybe two. Over this time, I think I can say that this has been beneficial for me. And I wanted to share this experience with others.

My thesis, specifically the part regarding Vertical Federated Learning, has been turned into a paper which has been presented during the UbiSec 2022 conference. Now, it has been published. It is called BlockLearning: A Modular Framework for Blockchain-Based Vertical Federated Learning.

January, the infamous first month of the year, is reaching an end. It was a very eventful month, but, by this time, I feel like I say that for every month that passes. I am honestly hoping that February will be a slightly more boring month in that sense.

This is the story on how whipped cream and cocoa powder have stressed me over the last two weeks. I hope that that is a seemingly weird enough sentence to keep you on reading. Or not. If you don’t want to keep going, it’s also fine. But let me tell you more.

A few years ago, I published an article where I did a small analysis of my Trakt data, which contains the shows and movies I have watched. I decided to bring that back again under the name “Year in Popcorn”. I considered “Year in Movies & Shows” but I thought that was too long and unappealing 😅.

2022 marked the year that I went to my first actual concert. By actual concert I mean a concert that I paid for for an artist I wanted to see, in an actual concert hall. And, of course, I listened to a lot o songs thorough the year. This is the recap of 2022 in Music. Let’s see what I’ve been listening to this year.

December is concluding and with it, we’re closing in the end of 2022. With the end of this month, I am writing one more retrospective about the events that have happened in my life during the past month. I am still on the fence whether or not I am writing a “year in review”. I will likely do a post for music and one for movies and TV shows with some stats. But I’m not sure I will write a generic year in review.