Writings

June was a reasonably packed month: some times more eventful than others, but that’s how it always is. Let’s make a small recap of what has happened lately.

I wanted to write an article and, even though I have a list of drafts and ideas about things I want to write, I thought: hmm, I would like to do something more fun. That reminded me of the article I wrote about fractal snowflakes and how to generate them, which gave me an idea 💡!

Today I bring something not as conventional: a post about certain elements of my website you could say that are inspired or borrowed from other websites. Things that I found fascinating and included in my website too over the time. Let’s go!

This is just a quick post to alert that I have changed my PGP key. It doesn’t receive much use, but in the eventuality that someone may want to send me something potentially encrypted, I think it’s reasonably good to keep the record that I updated the key at some point. The contact page has been updated accordingly.

In April, I squeezed into my monthly article that I had come back to Hugo. However, I did not give much context about it. And to continue the “farewell” post saga, here it is. Why did I move back to Hugo? What caused that decision, and how hard was it?

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.