I started to consume and appreciate coffee after I moved to Sweden in 2018. Coffee is a key part of the Swedish culture of fika, and it’s used as a way to combat the dark winter days months. For years, I’ve been considering the idea of buying a fancy coffee...
Surviving the AI Revolution as a Software Engineer
Is there still any hope?
Dear software engineer, as you may already know, AI is here to stay. It’s inevitable, and it changes everything. If you are worried about what OpenAI’s ChatGPT can do, hold on because it’s just the beginning. The next wave of extremely powerful and specialized AI models is coming faster than...
A Prime on Public Key Infrastructure
How do we trust each other in the digital era?
The whole internet is secured by the power of symmetric and asymmetric cryptography. Each time you visit a website, a cryptographic handshake occurs between your browser and a web server located somewhere on Earth. The authenticity of this connection is verified by a technology known as Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)....
My PhD as a Comic
The time when I became a superhero
Doing good science is hard. Communicating science is even harder because it requires a larger doses of creativity. I learned during my 5 years as a PhD student that art visuals and stories are excellent ways to communicate scientific ideas and results. But using art as a form of expression...
How to Give a Great Technical Presentation
Here's what I've learned
Public speaking has never been my forte. As a child, I often preferred blending into the crowd rather than standing out.1 However, I’ve since realized that in the pursuit of professional excellence, there is no way to avoid the public eye. Talent and hard work doesn’t really matter if I...
Prompting is All We Need
Is this the end of software engineering as we know it?
I’m a software engineer at heart. Consequently, a big chunk of my time revolves around writing code to solve problems. Lately, though, I’ve found myself putting aside the code-writing labor and everything else in text format. Still, I consider writing one of the most gratifying activities (especially once it is...
Let's Face It: Paper Figures Are Always Subject to Change
The story of a single figure
There is one painful truth about the process of writing research papers that I haven’t heard anyone talking about during my years as a PhD student: Figures keep changing until the very last moment! It seems that the journey of figures (and other kinds of visualizations) in research papers is...
Securing a Permanent Job in Sweden Before Completing My PhD
My personal experiences and tips
For better or worse, a PhD is a time constrained endeavour. For me, this represented almost 5 years of full-time research in Computer Science at KTH. When approaching completion, the decision of whether to pursue a career in academia or explore other paths lay before me. After some key considerations,...
Data Serialization/Deserialization in Java With Apache Avro
Getting started
When working with data processing in Java, choosing the right file format for storing and transmitting the data is crucial. Each format (such as CSV, JSON, or Parquet) has its particular advantages and disadvantages, as they are specifically designed to cater to different use cases. In this article, I’ll focus...
Submitting a research paper is probably one of the most happy moments in the working life career of PhD students. You’ve been dealing with a research paper for months, maybe years. And you know, clicking that “submit” button represents such a moment of relief. You just want it to be...