My name is Gonçalo. I’m Portuguese and hold a Master’s Degree in Informatics and Computing Engineering from FEUP. I am currently working as a Software Developer Trainee at Vestas, developing a tool to assist in the structural design of wind turbine towers. I am interested in the design of algorithms and data structures, the challenges associated with developing for distributed and performance-critical software, and systems programming.

My Master’s dissertation, Noise-Adaptive Reinforcement Learning Strategies for Qubit Routing leveraged deep reinforcement learning (specifically Proximal Policy Optimization) to compile quantum algorithms more efficiently for realistic architectures, in an effort to mitigate the adverse effects of noise on the outcome of computations. In particular, it tackled the NP-complete qubit routing problem, which arises due to the limited connectivity between qubits in many quantum computers. To ensure that a program adheres to these constraints, auxiliary operations must be inserted, and finding the optimal way to do so using the fewest additional operations is a challenging optimization problem.

I am also a hobbyist game developer. You can find my games on my itch.io page. Currently, I have published three games developed during game jams and two games developed as projects for a university course. You can also find game dev related videos on my YouTube channel. I am also interested in game design and video games as an art form, and plan to creating videos discussing those topics.

As for other hobbies, I enjoy playing all kinds of videogames (though I especially enjoy RPGs, stealth games and immersive sims), reading (mostly fantasy and science fiction), drawing and writing. I also like playing Magic: The Gathering from time to time (my favourite colour is Black).

Music also one of my passions. I mostly play the guitar and mandolin, and know a bit of piano and accordion.

Some of my favourite things, in no particular order

Games

  • Dark Souls Series - FROM Software
  • The Witcher Triology - CD Projekt Red
  • The Elder Scrolls Series - Bethesda
  • Prey - Arkane
  • Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Eidos Montréal
  • Guild Wars 2 - ArenaNet
  • Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain - Kojima Productions
  • Dishonored - Arkane
  • Super Meat Boy - Team Meat
  • Mark of The Ninja - Klei
  • Half Life Series - Valve
  • Bioshock - 2K
  • LittleBigPlanet - Media Molecule
  • Portal Series - Valve

Movies

  • The Dark Knight Triology - Cristopher Nolan
  • The Lord of the Rings Triology - Peter Jackson
  • Star Wars: Original Triology - George Lucas
  • The Social Network - David Fincher

TV Series

  • Mr. Robot - Sam Esmail
  • Person of Interest - Jonathan Nolan
  • Castle - Andrew W. Marlowe

Musical Artists

  • Dire Straits
  • Depeche Mode
  • Metallica
  • Pink Floyd
  • Red Hot Chili Peppers
  • Alphaville
  • Rui Veloso
  • Miguel Araújo
  • GNR
  • Pentakill
  • Jeremy Soule (Elder Scrolls, Guild Wars)
  • Jesper Kyd (Assassin’s Creed, Hitman)
  • Michael McCann (Deus Ex: Human Revolution)

Books

  • A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
  • 1984 - George Orwell

Programming Languages

  • C++
  • Rust
  • Python