Posts about how-to

This blogpost applies (as all my PhD related writings) to a PhD in computer science in the Netherlands. It will be different for other research fields and other countries.

In The Netherlands, most PhD students get a contract as university employees for 4 years. After the first 12-18 months there is an evaluation moment. By then, you are expected to have either your first conference paper under your belt (co-written with your supervisor), or at least have a paper manuscript ready for publication.

I finished my PhD in computer science more than three years ago. Now that I have a little bit of mental distance from my PhD time, I'm going through my research diary to see if there's stuff in there that can be useful for other people.

Apparently I'm incapable of writing short-form texts, so here is part 1. ;)

Herrie is the best music player there is! That is, if you're like me and you like minimal terminal applications.

A friend of mine is currently looking for a new job. She was asking around for a few good tips on job hunting. I spent quite some time looking for a job right after finishing my PhD in 2022, so I had ample to share. After penning down these tips on irc, we decided that storing them in a more persistent, public place might be useful for others as well.

Hi everyone! In this post I'll show you how I valuate mergers and acquisitions and other special situation investments. I started doing this after reading You can be a stock market genius by Joel Greenblatt. Despite the clickbait title, this is a really good book about special situation investing.

I wrote this list of tips for networking just after I visited my first conference, where networking was supereasy! And it was FUN! Although Troopers 2017 was an industry conference, the tips should work fine for academic conferences too.

I talked to so many interesting people, people working in infosec from all over the globe. I even managed to help some of them, by answering questions on social media, introducing people to each other, and pointing people to good self-education resources on the internet. I love to help people, so that made the networking activity feel very natural for me. It was not like the picture I had in my head at all (people in suits loudly talking about themselves while scattering business cards at random). I also loved to exchange horror stories about employers or infosec-gone-wrong. And the most fun thing is to form a spontaneous group of conference-friends and explore the local cuisine.

In this blogpost I want to explain how I use Twitter, and how social media is helping me with my research.

This blogpost is meant for researchers that either already have an account at Twitter or want to start using it. Throughout this post, I do assume you are already familiar with how Twitter works. If you're not, read the documentation in the Twitter help center or just create an account, dive in and learn it by doing. ;)

I would like to share with you what I learned in the past 6 years as a print designer for Karpe Noktem. If you want to get started with designing posters, you need to adhere to some basic rules.

I presume that you have some notion of how Photoshop works. If you use different software, that’s no problem: Paint Shop Pro or GIMP will do as well, as long as you know some basics such as choosing the correct canvas sizes, the behaviour of layers, etc. What I want to emphasize is that you don’t have to be a photo manipulation wizard or artist prodigy to make a good poster. If you don’t know how how to do something, be sure to google it. You can find plenty tutorials online.

Hey guys! As a continuation of my tutorial on poster design, I thought I’d write a blogpost with an example. Here’s the step-by-step design process of the poster “Pluk de nacht”.

Today, I want to give you some tips and tricks for when you want to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator. I’ve been using Illustrator for two years now. In the beginning, I really struggled with the pen tool and the fact that the program is so different from Photoshop! I hope I can help some of you by sharing how I started out using Illustrator.

Forget everything you think you know about Illustrator since you know Photoshop. You’ll thank me later.

When I was visiting Castlefest this year, I had the great opportunity to visit Kunst Op Straat. This artful collective gave some really interesting workshops and lectures about a variety of creative things, ranging from painting and song-writing to historical clothing. I signed up for a workshop on chainmail.

Since I was not entirely new to chainmail the guy conducting the workshop was kind enough to show me some advanced stuff — by which I mean something different than the planned ‘make your own keychain’.