Fabio Barbero's personal website and blog.
I'm currently on a train from Berlin to Hamburg. In Berlin, I attended the SUMO Conference 2026 , where I learned that SUMO seems to be a legitimately cool piece of software that only a handful of people know how to use fully, and where I surprisingly found a simulation project using some spaghetti code me and two friends coded around 2019 . Anyway, I wanted to share someone else's game…
Well hi. I haven't posted any posts in a while. There have been quite some reasons for that. For one, having a job that forces me to be on my laptop the whole day makes me want to not be on my laptop outside of work hours. My right hand also starts to hurt after typing for a while, which makes typing unpleasant. And perhaps a lack of interest of sharing stuff in writing. The rising adoption…
Where My Side Projects Go: ~/Download/tmp Yes, most of my side projects live in a folder named tmp inside my Downloads directory. Now you might think: This is a terrible idea. And you’d be right. The folder’s name and location doesn't follow the best naming patterns, and it could easily be deleted by accident. Yet, this folder holds some of my proudest work: code to determine the…
When checking my phone last Friday morning, I was greeted by an email (in German) informing me (after a bit of translating) that Pocket , the service I had been actively using for over 2 years to save blogposts, is shutting down. You might be surprised to learn that I'm upset about this. After all, for a lot of people Pocket is that annoying icon you once accidentally pressed on the Firefox…
Part 1 - an unexpected encounter By now, I have commuted from Brussels to Innsbruck quite a few times. The trip is never the same, because trains in Germany are often cancelled and delayed, but I've got used to this predictable unpredictability. The ICE trains are really comfortable, and it's always a nice ride to work, read a book and listen to music. I even managed to publish a new…
Introduction This short post introduces a new live visualisation that can be found here , and explains the origin of the data. ✨ Try the online demo here! What is this? It's been a while since I last published a blogpost about my research on trains. If you've been following my blog in the past months, you will know about my interest for isochrone maps. The visualisation you see above is…
Introduction If you've been following my past blogposts , you probably figured that, for my master's thesis, I'm working on the European Passenger Rail Network. I am indeed. You might have also seen that I am travelling a lot , and might be questioning whether my thesis is actually progressing or if I'm just enjoying spending a lot of money on Interrail tickets. Well, let me…
It was a late Saturday afternoon. Gaelle, her sister Quiteri and I were on a train from Püspökladány, Hungary, to Oradea, Romania. I met Gaelle around 1 year ago, at my favourite bar in Montreal . It was quite funny to meet again on a small train, in Hungary. Gaelle and Quiterie have a crazy goal in mind: to reach Japan from France, without taking the plane. Being able to work on my master thesis…
Introduction As part of my master's thesis, I want to compute the optimal train route between cities during a certain period. In my last blogpost , I briefly talked about my frustration setting up OpenTripPlanner, a popular trip planner, and why I decided to look for other alternatives instead. I am planning on releasing a more detailed comparison in a future blogpost. A trip planner…
This is going to be a slightly long introduction, but bear with me. Let's imagine that you're researching existing tools for a project of yours. A university project, perhaps . Since this field is slightly new to you, and overall pretty niche, you need to figure out what exists and what you need to implement from scratch. You've got quite good at searching for new stuff, and getting…
Introduction 4 month ago, before starting my thesis "on trains" , I had never worked in the field of "trains". I am used to working in completely different environment. I have worked at a well structured company, where developers text me on Discord while being in the same room , unorganised startups where the founders work full time on other projects , academic environments in which you won't…
Introduction As discussed in my last blogpost , I have been exploring different General Transit Feed Specifications (GTFS) sources to build a railway map of Europe with scheduling data. In this short blogpost, I will show some simple visualisations to look at the data I managed to collect from two databases: Mobility Database and transit.land . Additionally, I looked at stations on Open Street Map…
Introduction Imagine the following hypothetical scenario: you've given yourself the task to work on attempting to visualize and optimize the rail network in Europe , and now you need to find a way to get transit data. You're interested in getting the data about the physical train tracks, as well as the timetables of all rail companies in Europe. And, why not, bus companies and other…
Short context I spent quite a few months looking for a thesis topic that I'd be interested in working on, to finish my Master. For the past 3 years, I've enjoyed less and less spending time on my laptop, working on issues that seemed irrelevant or unproductive both in terms of societal and personal impact. Moving my body, interacting with people, working towards a common goal are things…
I replied to Academia SPAM ... and got a nonsensical paper published. Part 1: Context I am not a Professor or a Doctor of any kind. My few publications have not had a big impact in my field, and are really not that innovative or revolutionary. And yet, multiple times a year, I receive emails that look like this: From: venus.loh@acad-pub.net Subject: Invitation to ΡuЬlish Your Аrtiϲlеs Dear Prof.…
- What are you doing in Montreal? - I'm doing an internship at an AI Startup - Oh cool! What are you working on? - Oh, I use computer vision to detect athletes and extract metrics from it Yeah, I wish. Fixing the freaking computer So, I might have accidentally broken the ZED Box Orin NX computer on the first day of my internship. Great. It's not like it's more than 1000 bucks and I…
Today I won a battle. Not a big one or a significant one, but one that, I feel, is worth telling a story about. As a part of their Data Science Master at Maastricht University, Master students can decide to work on a project with a company. Some companies send Project Proposals to the faculty, which publishes them to an intranet as well as printing them after being approved. When looking at these…
This blog section of my website has been silent for a while. Although I doubt that anyone really missed it, I'm personally happy to come back to writing after so long. Working at Odoo From September 2021 to the end of last month, I worked as a Software Developer at Odoo. It was my first full-time job, and I was excited to experience how it would work for me. In this post, I will talk about my…
What happened this year? 2021 has been quite a year for me. I graduated from university, published two papers, got a job as a Software Developer and, most importantly, focused on my mental and physical health. I gave myself quite a few challenges , from only taking cold showers for a month to doing more sports. This post will summarize a few things I did this year, mainly for personal recalling.…
There's a chance you're here after a discussion we've had about music. I've decided to write a collection of artists/songs I particularly like. I will try to keep this updated, and feel free to share any of your music with me! Note: I listen to a lot of music weekly, and am struggling a bit to keep this list updated as I keep discovering new cool artists. Consider this as…
× Vegan Lasagne Recipe Introduction For some obscure reason recipe blogs always have a super long introduction telling the whole backstory of the recipe, so I feel obliged to have a short introduction. Everyone knows lasagne 1 . They're a great italian dish perfect for dates and pretty much any other occasion that involves eating. Italians tend not to like to revisit their recipes,…
Introduction What is Ludii? Ludii is a "general game system designed to play, evaluate and design a wide range of games, including board games, card games, dice games, mathematical games, and so on." (taken from Ludii's website ). Ludii games (in .lud file format) are usually loaded in the Ludii Player , which compiles the game with Java and gives an interface to play with, with also AIs to…
Here is a list of cool people I've met in the past few years. If you have some spare time, I'd recommend looking at their projects on their websites and showing some support. Please note that the list has no particular order. Paulius Skaisgiris Paul has been my flatmate for two years and I have shared many projects with him. You can follow him on his personal website , or "slice of…
Making a Signal bot in Python (Linux) Note: This guide was last updated on 29/07/2022. It is no longer maintained. What's signal? Signal is a cross-platform, centralized (😞), encrypted messaging service that I've been using for a few years now. My friends and I decided to switch to Signal as an alternative to Whatsapp, which unlike Signal collects a lot of metadata of your…
Why Good question. I realised a while back that I was getting stuck in many "unhealthy loops": checking my phone for no reason, browsing reddit/youtube in search of dopamine, finding myself in a stressful mindset... I had been doing meditation for a while, and finally decided to apply what I learned in those 10min meditations to my daily life. Challenges have been a great way of getting out…
I found this old document I wrote years ago, thought I might put it here. Content is highly outdated. For a more updated soustainable guide, check out the Sustainable Guide Maastricht Short guide on how to be a green (and healthy) student in Maastricht Last udated: 02/2019 Aim of this guide The aim of this guide is to list some tips and give advice on how to reduce your ecological impact in…