About Me

Hey everyone, my name is Henrique and I’d like to welcome you to my little digital corner.

The purpose of this page is to provide a glimpse into who I am and what inspires me every day.

I am a full-time student at EPITA (Paris, France) getting a bachelor’s degree in cybersecurity. I am in my second year and loving every minute of it (except for the exams, thanks, old-fashioned school system…).

In my free time, I’m either reading or constantly tweaking my NixOS setup on all of my servers and devices in an effort to make it flawless.

I live with my lovely family and dog in a city near Paris.

To sum myself up, I’d describe myself as a twentysomething IT and cybersecurity nerd who is constantly eager to learn more. I’m extremely fortunate to have the life I do.

My hobbies

Studying obviously takes up most of my time, but I enjoy doing any of the things below when I have time.

Reading

During my daily commute, which takes about two and a half hours, I spend most of my time reading.

As a huge fan of dystopian and cyberpunk genres, I enjoy reading about worlds that are exaggerated, such as those with highly technological cities that are also dehumanized, which can be seen as a critique of our societies. I am apprehensive when I observe reality approaching cyberpunk levels.

As most enjoyers of this genre of reading do, I love to leaf through all Philip K. Dick books or William Gibson ones.

CTFs

As per Wikipedia, CTF (capture-the-flag) is an exercise in which participants attempt to find text strings, called “flags,” which are secretly hidden in purposefully vulnerable programs or websites.

I started doing this kind of challenge in mid-2021, and I’ve been doing it since. It marked me in such a way that now I want to make a cybersecurity career.

I’ve had the unique opportunity of participating three times at the most important CTF for young talents at the European level, the ECSC.

NixOS

Again, as per Wikipedia, NixOS is a Linux distribution built around the Nix package manager. Unlike traditional Linux distributions, NixOS is configured using a functional language that describes the system configuration.

Oh my… where do I begin? I’ve been a Linux whiz for a few years now (let’s say maybe five). I started with Fedora, then switched to Debian and Arch, and then switched back and forth between them for a while before deciding to devote myself entirely to NixOS about a year ago.

First I switched my main laptop to NixOS. Then I was so happy with it that I switched my server and then my desktop. Today I have over 400 commits.

It’s a lot of fun for me to configure and modify the system declaratively. I’m very particular about having a minimal system, and NixOS is one of the distributions that lets me have that.