My updates about swimming keep aging fast, and that’s a good sign. Last month, I mentioned I was finally having lessons at the deep end of the pool, and how it was being a blast. So much happened the past three weeks though!
I had mentioned I asked the teacher if we could have a lesson on the deeper pool. Well, we did. The pool is 4 meters deep, which is more than twice as much as the swimming pool where we usually have our classes.
It went well and was less scary than I expected. However, when you’re swimming with your face down and you… look down… it’s something. It’s almost a void, especially considering the tiles on this pool are quite dark. Or maybe not all lights were on.
Anyways, not only did we swim and dive in that pool, but we also jumped from the 1 meter diving plank. That was fine. Then we jumped from the 3 meter. It probably took me some 5 minutes of reluctancy and fear to do it, but I did. I want to do it again.
After that lesson, we had another special one: a fully clothed lesson. Yes, with a shirt with long sleeves, pants and normal shoes. I was expecting to have to do this for a few laps because it’s part of the survival part of the Diploma A, but not for a whole class.
It was extremely tiring. 45 minutes with clothes. Not only is it harder to swim because of the weight of the clothes, but the shoes act as floatation devices, meaning your feet just wanna come higher than they should. That makes it annoying.
Fortunately, at some point we were allowed to take the shoes off, but we kept doing stuff with the clothes on, from diving, front crawl, swim through holes, etc.
And… the class after it was the afzwemmen, which means I now have the Diploma A! That means that I’m now allowed to actually go for lap swimming. I did that today and it was nice. There were some incredibly fast people - or I am very slow!
I would like to show a photo of the diploma, but I’ll only get the physical diploma the next lesson, which is after the May vacation, in two weeks. I’ll update the post to include the photo by then.
The plan is to continue lessons for Diploma B, and then C. In the meanwhile, I am aiming to go swimming once a week besides the lessons. Still need to see what time works best for me. I also think it’s time to cross the fear of deep water out of my impossible list.
]]>The Netherlands might not have mountains, but there are always incredible pieces of nature here and there. This is where we took a walk on Monday, the Mookerheide, in Nijmegen, next to the German border. The weather was not the best, but we got to see some Highlanders.
Now that I am looking back at what happened in March, I see it was quite of a calm month. Oddly enough, I didn’t perceive it as so, since I feel like it went by so fast. Let’s then take a look back together, but I’m sure this will be a shorter post than in the previous months.
At the beginning of the month, I attended the first ever AT Protocol meetup in Amsterdam, which took place at the Internet Archive Europe. There was no plan, besides getting a few folks together that are interested in this world. It was nice to meet everyone, and I hope a new meetup gets organized at some point soon.
I must confess that seeing all posts come back the last few days about the ATmosphereConf 2026 gave me a bit of FOMO, but not too much. I did consider going, but I would’ve wanted to plan it further ahead, since I’m sure Chris would also like going to Canada, and it’d be nice to do a little vacation there.
I also organized one more working from Eindhoven day, where I got all my coworkers to come to Eindhoven. We worked at my place, and I booked lunch and dinner at two nice places nearby. It was a blast. On this sort of days, I feel like I work more as a barista than actually working. It’s a good variety.
Other than that, not much more happened: visited friends, friends visited, baked a basque cheesecake, made a lot of cold brew tea, voted in the Municipal Elections, went to the cinema, normal things. We also bought a 3D printer, but I haven’t done much with it (Chris has!). I want to write about that later. Other perhaps interesting updates will follow in the next sections.
I’ve written a bit about swimming earlier today, so you can read that. Spoiler alert: it’s going well! When it comes to strength training, I’ve been increasing the weight slowly. I’ve gotten to the point where back in January - I think? - I started feeling my wrist a bit, not pain, but tiredness. Now, instead of cutting back the weight, I just decided to go ahead. And I think it’s working.
I planned an appointment with the physiotherapy anyways. It’s all much better than before, but there are still two categories of movements that are painful, especially bending backwards with pressure. Imagine getting out of a swimming pool: I know use my forearms to climb out, but that’s a lot of work. Maybe progressive loading exercises will help, but I just want to check with the PT first.
This past month I only watched three movies, all in the cinema: Marty Supreme, Pillion and Joe Speedboot. They were all nice, but I got very annoyed at Marty Supreme. The character was so irritating that I considered leaving the room in the middle. I think the director really managed to build a film where those feelings passed onto the audience. In that sense, it is very good.
We did also watch quite a few shows: from the last season of Bridgerton to binging all the seasons of Trying, Derry Girls and Mayfair Witches. We also ended Drops of God and Talamasca: The Secret Order.
Well, I guess more happened than I expected, or at least I had to write more than I thought I would. So much so, I extracted the part about swimming into its own post so this one wouldn’t get too long! Until next month!
]]>My update about swimming late last month aged very fast. Two weeks after, I got moved up to level 5, which means that all of my lessons are now fully on the deep side of the swimming pool. It’s going well and I enjoy it a lot. Once I get the Diploma A, I’ll be allowed to go swimming laps at the swimming pool.
I think my fear of deep water is decreasing, at least at the pool. The swimming pool where we have lessons is not that deep, but it’s more than enough to not be able to stand. Nevertheless, I asked the teacher if we could maybe have a lesson on a deeper pool, and she’ll check if that’s possible.
I’ve gone a few times to the recreation swimming times at the swimming pool because I still want to get some swimming in, and this is the only option since I don’t have a Diploma A yet. But it’s a lot of gedoe for two reasons: the time and the setting.
Recreational swimming starts from 10:00 in the morning, and if I want to avoid a lot of busyness, I need to go early. That time is just too inconvenient, since I need to bike 15-20 minutes to the swimming pool, then change, then swim, then change, then bike back, then shower. That’s around 2 hours break during my working day, and I don’t like it being that long.
The other problem is the setting: recreational swimming is not made for swimming laps. In the morning during week days there’s mostly older people swimming laps, but as soon as one kid or one person doesn’t do it, everyone must stop. And the non-deep part of the recreational swimming pool is also not that huge, it gets crowded very fast.
Swimming laps can earlier in the day, from 7:00 in the morning even, and it’s orderly. That’d be perfect for me, but I’m not allowed yet. So I’ll need to wait a bit longer. Excited for it! My plan is to start going once a week once I get Diploma A. Then, I’ll keep doing the lessons until Diploma C. At that point, I’ll probably go twice a week!
]]>In general, I haven’t been very outspoken about LLMs in this blog, or in general. For no specific reason other than not using them that much. I’m now revisiting the topic, as I’ve implemented a few features with the help of Claude Code in Eagle, the little program behind my website.
Some context about how my website works: it’s fully statically generated with Hugo, except for a few dynamic features powered by Eagle. Eagle is just a wrapper around the Hugo website. Most of the time it just serves static files. However, it does quite a few things on the side.
Some time ago, I wrote about my experience using LLMs for code development. At the time, I tried both ChatGPT on their website, as well as GitHub Copilot through VS Code. It did some nice things, but I wasn’t really blown away. So I went on using GitHub Copilot as a glorified autocomplete.
In the meanwhile, and after constantly seeing stuff online about it and how great it is, I got a month subscription for Claude Code because I wanted to try it out. Mind you: I have used Claude before, but only through its web interface. This is specific about Claude Code.
The tasks I gave Claude were things that have been on my ever growing TODO list for quite some time. They’re not very complex tasks, but they’re things that I don’t really get that much pleasure from doing, and they’re also not things that I really want. They’re good to haves. So… perfect for Claude. Here’s what I wanted:
As I said, the tasks are not very complex, just mildly boring. After asking Claude to do one by one, and reviewing the code it made, I still had to make a few adjustments, or ask Claude to do them for me, whatever I deemed to be faster. In the end, everything worked quite well, and I’m a bit impressed.
Just like I said last time, I think it’s a great tool, if used well. If you know exactly what you need it to do, and give a direction on how it should be done, it seems to do its thing. I have a few other things I want to add to Eagle, and they’re a bit more complex than the tasks I asked Claude to do. So I’m very curious to see how Claude ends up performing. I’m a bit more positive than on my last article!
In the meanwhile, Anthropic was offering 6 months of Claude Max for open source maintainers. After applying and waiting a few days, I got a link to activate the subscription. I haven’t been able to activate it yet, because of my current subscription. I’m hoping the link doesn’t expire in the next few days!
]]>Last year, I wrote a bit on maintaining open source projects. At the time, I was struggling with one of my most (unexpectedly) successful side projects, File Browser. Today, I want to give an update on it, since I never wrote again about it. I’m hoping that this post helps explaining the current status of the project.
As many of you know, I maintain several open source projects. Most of them are quite small, personal side projects, where I’m the main user. Those consume personal time. Others, are part of work, such as some of the Open Wallet Foundation libraries, and previously IPFS. Those consume work time.
Over the years, a new sort of project showed up: File Browser. It is in its own category. Back in 2017, it started getting some traction, and increased from 200 to 700 stars in a week. That was an amazing thing for an 17 year old kid. What I did not know is that that project would grow to millions of downloads and over 33k stars on GitHub.
The background of this project explains very well - I think - the reason it is the way it is nowadays. I started File Browser - or File Manager at the time - as a simple plugin for Caddy, when Caddy wasn’t yet as ubiquitous as nowadays. After some time, I made it its own project.
I was 15 years old. Let that sink in. My knowledge and concerns about security were quite low, which explains the flood of security advisories that have come out of this repository over the past months. The only thing I wanted was a single-binary program that I could run in a server and give me a file browser interface on the web. Simple.
I kept maintaining the project for a few years, until life got in the way. Back in 2020, I bestowed the power to someone in the community to maintain the project. I sort of forgot it during a few years, and checked every now and then to see how the project was going. I just kept seeing the stars - and the issues! - increase.
At some point last year, I noticed the project was not getting much love. I contacted the maintainer and after some back and forth, we decided to look for new maintainers, and also the consideration of archiving the project for good. That brought a lot of opinions.
After some time, I found two people (@jniggemann and @ramiresviana) to help with triaging issues, as well as reviewing PRs. That was nice. After that, I made a decision: I would keep maintaining the project, but purely maintenance-mode only. That means a few things:
But people keep making PRs for new features. Features that I do really think would benefit the project. Sometimes I have to reject them, sometimes it takes too long to look at them because they are too long, I don’t have time, they get out of date, and the creator disappears. In the meanwhile, comments from other people start piling up because they want said feature.
While that happens, security vulnerabilities start pouring, because a software created by the 15 year old Henrique was not the most security conscious. For some security vulnerabilities, I manage to make a fix and ship it. Others are just too complex that I end up opening an issue for it, while disclosing the vulnerability. I don’t like doing that, but it’s best to make the user aware that there are issues, not solve them, and ask for help via an issue, than not do anything.
I’m no longer 15. I’m 26, and interests change. My life priorities are different, and I still think I give a lot of time to File Browser that I wish I would dedicate to other projects. But I realize it’s important to keep the promise of keeping it in maintenance-only mode.
I’ve realized, over the past months, that I don’t have enough bandwidth to review feature requests, ensure they are good and working, while at the same time reviewing bug fixes - there are quite many! With that being said, I’ll be updating the README to make it much more clear that new features and the review of feature PRs is not planned.
It’s complicated. I understand your frustration, as a user. And I’m sorry if I haven’t been the nicest in a reply here and there. But just like you, I’m human. I have other interests in my life, other projects I want to dedicate my time to. And this project is consuming more time than I wish it would. If someone else wants to take the reins, I’m always up for a chat. It’s important that you’ve contributed before, however!
]]>At the beginning of February, I wrote about my recent adventures in the ATmosphere. At the time of writing, I was working on adding standard.site support to this website. In the meanwhile, I’ve finished it and my blog should be fully compliant with the specification.
But first things first: what is standard.site? What does it do? What is it useful for? I think their website explains it very well and succinctly:
Standard.site provides shared lexicons for long-form publishing on AT Protocol. Making content easier to discover, index, and move across the ATmosphere.
The greatest benefit this website gets from implementing Standard.site support is that it becomes indexed and discoverable by many other tools that are built on the AT Protocol, such as Leaflet, GreenGale, and pkct.
Some Bluesky clients, such as Heron, are also starting to implement support for these lexicons and adding your long-form documents right on your profile, making them even more discoverable for people following you.
Adding support for Standard.site means publishing this website as a site.standard.publication lexicon, and every post as a site.standard.document. For those who’ve followed my blog for a longer time, you know that this website does POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere - to some platforms, including Bluesky.
With that being said, adding support for Standard.site-lexicons was quite straightforward. I’m not going into the nitty gritty on how the code works, since that’s highly specific to the custom-made engine powering this website. On a higher level, this is what happens:
site.standard.publication is upserted when the blog engine starts. This is mostly to ensure that the record is up to date, with the latest description, title, etc. Since this rarely gets updated, it’s fine to need to restart the blog engine to update it.site.standard.document is created when a writings post is created, and updated when a post is updated. That happens in this bit of the code. I decided to only publish the posts under the writings category as those are the only long-form posts on this website. Photos are already POSSE’d as Bluesky posts anyways and I didn’t feel like they fit the “long-form” story that well.When I implemented this, I also wrote a script to retroactively publish all existing posts as site.standard.documents. I made sure that the record key was based on the original timestamp of the article to ensure sortability - and because I thought it looked better when navigating the PDS.
It’s been quite fascinating to see everything happening in the ATmosphere the past weeks, and how some tools are growing and getting more traction. Curious about the future!
]]>The shortest month of the year is now ending, which means that two months of 2026 are already gone! February was quite a busy month for me, and it feels like I never had time to fully stop and rest. Let’s take a look.
This was a big month for this website, full of changes and new things. From a technical perspective, I finally ditched Cloudflare and moved completely to Bunny DNS. Later in the month, I also introduced a completely new design, which made me a bit nervous, but now I’m more accustomed to it.
I’ve also made a few other small updates here and there. Some I want to write about, so I will not bother you about them yet. But smaller things I introduced were the new coffee bags page, where I track the coffee bags I’ve bought, as well as a rating; and also the new attended page, after extracting the live performances from the watched page.
At the beginning of the month, I went to FOSDEM, which I’ve already written about. The week after, I went once more to The Hague for the second round of the Portuguese Presidential Elections. In contrast to the first round, I did not have to wait a long time to vote. However, due to maintenance works on the train tracks, the trip to The Hague took quite some time, since I had to go via Schiphol.
I almost decided not to go, but voting is important, even if you no longer live in the country. On a good note, the populist party did not win! Chris came with me, and then we went to Leiden, since we already had to pass through there anyways. We saw a bit of the city, and bought some nice tea at Het Klaverblad.
I did not run this month, as I’ve been focusing on swimming. I’ve started going twice a week to the swimming pool, and in my last lesson last Thursday I went to the deep area of the pool. I was a bit nervous and a bit uneasy, but I just did it anyways. It went better than I expected.
Other than that, I continued with my strength training workouts, which I realized have not been as heavy as they should be. There’s a gym opening nearby next month, so maybe I will try that out. I have some dumbbells at home, but I think having a space focused for it makes me also more likely to push myself more than at home.
I attended what I would usually consider too many concerts 🎵 this month: three. Considering we need to travel quite some time to get to the concert venues, it definitely contributed to the general tiredness this month. The two smaller concerts we went two were Magdalena Bay and Audrey Hobert. Both fantastic in their own ways. These were not artists that I knew that well, but I still enjoyed it a lot!
A bonus here was that Allie X opened for Magdalena Bay. I’m a big fan of her, and I’m really happy that I was able to see her one more time. We were not even expecting that, since we only looked at what was the pre-programme one or two days before. So nice.
Then, the star of the month, was Florence + The Machine. She has such an amazing voice, and the band was also terrific. They played a harp live, and even did a harp solo. I’ve never see that before. Having Paris Paloma open their show just made it even better!
When it comes to movies 🍿, we watched Saltburn, The Threesome, Wuthering Heights (the new one), and Bottoms. They were all entertaining, some better than others, but that’s what we always happens. If I had to recommend one, I think I’d either recommend The Threesome or Saltburn, depending on what kind of movies you enjoy.
When it comes to TV Shows 📺, we watched the first season of How to Get to Heaven From Belfast and Trying. Both really enjoyable. We’ve also been busy trying to watch Bridgerton, but we have not yet watched the second part that was released a few days ago!
Have a nice weekend!
]]>A few weeks ago, I wrote about finally starting swimming lessons. Almost two months in, I thought it’d be nice to write a small check-in on how it’s going. If I had summarize the past few weeks, it’d be simple: I’m loving it!
Loving it doesn’t come as a surprise since I have been in a swimming club at school, and I really enjoyed it. But that’s almost a decade - or actually a full decade - ago, and since then I’ve only been once or twice to the swimming pool.
The lessons are structured in 5 levels, from 1 to 5. The lowest are about getting acquainted with the water, floating, doing small things. The highest is almost fully in deep water. After two or three lessons, I jumped to level 3 since I could already do all the necessary basics.
Now being in level 3, I’m focusing on the breaststroke - schoolslag -, specifically with the head above water. It’s being difficult. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, but I’ll ask the teacher next lesson. On the back it’s quite fine, and crawl on both back and belly is also fine enough I’d say.
The goal from now on is also: if something doesn’t go well, just turn around and do the rest on the back! Making that a habit is important to when I get to the deep pool.
I’ve also decided going a second time per week to the swimming pool for practicing. I noticed that the entry is cheaper for people taking lessons, so that’s nice. I decided to do that last week for the first time, but it turned out to be a bad idea.
Last week was also Carnaval’s vacation and there were a lot of kids, even on a Tuesday morning. Today I went again, and besides a few older people, I had more than enough space to go back and forth. I think my breaststroke legs are going well, but I’m doing something wrong with my hands (or not enough). I shall ask the teacher on Thursday and keep working on it!
]]>If you’re reading this on my website right now, you might be thinking: what the hell did Henrique do? After a few years of calmness and small changes here and there, I’ve decided to fully redesign this website. And by fully, I mean rewrite around half of the CSS. Much of the old CSS is still floating around. Welcome to my refurbished Internet island!
Before diving into the new design, I want to look back at the previous design. It started, in its original form, back in 2021. Those were Covid times, times where I had the time to redesign the website every full moon.
Over the years, the design became more and more consistent, and ended up converging to what I was. I really enjoyed it, I think it felt like “me” and there was no other website that looked similar, as far as I know. I’m quite happy that it lasted as much as it did. Looking at photos from 2023, the site barely changed. A few tweaks here and there, but it was a design I was really happy with.
To commemorate, let’s look at some screenshots.
For some time, I’ve been wanting to change some things on this website, but I was afraid of losing what makes this website “me”. This maybe stems from this website having looked the same for such a long time, that it created some sort of irrational fear of change. Inertia. It’s always there. With the new design, there were a few things I wanted to achieve. Let’s go through a few of them, one by one.
Take advantage of wide screens. Screen widths have changed dramatically over the years, the pixels keep coming, and our websites keep staying centered in the middle, floating in an ocean of empty space. After seeing Dietrich’s website, I thought: this is a cool usage of wide space.
With this in mind, I built my new homepage based on the old one, letting the photo grid sit next to the latest posts. If the screen size becomes small enough, they’ll just fall back down to the same column. There are other pages taking advantage of wide screens, like the guestbook, gallery, etc.
Left-aligned with sidebar. For some reason, I’ve been wanting to have a sidebar on this website for quite some time. I have absolutely no idea why. However, every time I tried moving the navigation bar to the sidebar, I didn’t really like it.
But then it hit me: what if both exist? A grid layout like Luke’s, but using the sidebar for the contact information. The contact page was becoming shorter and shorter and I also wanted to get rid of it. Two birds with one stone.
This sidebar also adapts elegantly - I hope. On mobile, the contact links will float down to the bottom of the page, right above the footer, except for in the homepage, where they’ll sit on top, below the navigation bar. The navigation bar scrolls horizontally on mobile. I do hope it’s clear. I’m sure I’ll make more tweaks with time.
Balancing personality, modernness and cleanliness. Not even sure what that means, but I wanted the website to look a bit more modern, clean, and still exude the same feelings as before. That I can’t judge, I think someone else needs to do it for me. I tried to keep as many elements as possible. After all, it’s mostly a readjustment of positions. Font-types, colors, emojis, those things were kept. Pages that had custom backgrounds still got to keep them.
I mostly tried to make the design more coherent. An example are the post cards you see on the writings and photos pages. Before, the photo cards would show all the photos, which led to very long pages, especially when some of those photo posts included 10 or so images. Now the cards are unified, using a single design. You can click on it, and then see the full grid for that post, as I intended.
There are, of course, a few things I’m less happy about. There are a few more lines CSS, not that many more, but still. I want to look back at it and try cleaning it up sometime. I’m also a bit sad the little avatar that sat on top of the navigation bar is gone, but I couldn’t find a good place for it.
And on the homepage, depending on how wide your screen is, either one of the two columns will be longer than the other. For smaller devices, when it’s a single column, I limit the amount of items, but sadly it’s not yet possible to target specific grid rows. If that were possible, maybe, just maybe, I would be able to achieve exactly what I want without JS.
Once CSS grid-lanes are widely available, I will also be applying those to some pages. If you use Safari Technology Preview, you can go to the guestbook and see what I mean. Other pages could benefit from that, like the photo gallery.
Well, I’m happy with the design, and I hope it will serve me for quite some time. What do you think? Leave a note on my guestbook, or reply via one of the links below! 👋
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