About

About me

I’m Gabriel, a Portuguese software developer who is presently mostly focused on backend work, using Go and other typical tools of the trade, at a mid-sized multinational startup in its late stage. My interests include cybersecurity, programming language design, open source software, game modding and music making.

Previously, I used to make software and services for the web, Android, and embedded systems, including UI design and frontend work. I worked with multiple technology stacks, including quite obscure ones, and sometimes dabbled into reverse-engineering too. Under the rule of a diminishing function whose inputs include “free time” and “motivation,” I still try to do some of that.

Disclaimer: My views don’t represent those of my employer, even if, during working hours, they definitely align, as mandated by common decency and the applicable employee handbook. Please, HR and legal: there is no need to look any further.

I’m gbl08ma throughout the internet; my username is so specific that anyone else using it can only be considered an impersonator. You may want to follow me on Bluesky.

About this website

This website contains my long archive of blog posts dating back to my teenage years, back when I wasn’t really qualified to build many of the things I did – and yet I sometimes succeeded. The topics are all over the place, all generally related to my interests at the time each post was written… but I’ve always had too many interests.

The views and concerns expressed in my older posts, particularly those written prior to 2015 or 2016, are unlikely to accurately depict my current opinions and level of knowledge. I started writing these blog posts when I was literally 14 years old; more time has passed between those initial posts and now, than between my birth and their publishing. A lot of the context surrounding them is now missing, lost in obscure forum discussions and news articles that have vanished from public conscience and, sometimes, the web.

I like keeping the older posts around, for one because I dislike link rot, and because they help prove that I’ve had a stable online presence for a long time. Even if text is now cheap in the age of LLMs, hopefully some internet archive will prove how they were written well before the latest AI cycle. These posts show the evolution of my technical knowledge, of my vision of the world, of the concerns keeping me up at night, and of my writing skills. Their cringeworthiness is the essential aspect that makes them valuable to me, even if their value to others is closer to zero the further back we go.

This website suffered many server and address migrations throughout its first years. It was originally powered by a self-hosted WordPress instance, and allowed non-authenticated users to comment throughout much of its life. I decided to preserve those comments too, as they were often cringier/funnier than my own writing. Still, I couldn’t help but preserve the calls to “comment” seen in the older posts! I now believe comments are better left to external services, namely social media - where there’s no chance for me to censor readers’ thoughts.

More recently, mostly for security reasons, I wanted to move away from the complexity of such a large PHP application, to something that wouldn’t even require a database server. In May 2026, I finally put in the effort to find a technology stack I was happy with (lichen.page + Hugo), migrated all posts to it, and archived my WordPress instance. It’s possible some formatting was lost, and I noticed that some of the older pictures were already unavailable.
You can read more about this migration in its dedicated blog post.

For any inquiries related to my add-ins for Casio calculators, please read: Casio Prizm software