There is a word in Portuguese that resists every translation: Saudade. Dictionaries reach for “longing”, or “nostalgia”, or “a melancholic yearning for something absent”. None of them is a good translation, really. Saudade is not sadness, it is the feeling of carrying a place with you after you have left it: of a country, a person, a version of yourself, still present in the way it shapes what you notice, what you miss, what you compare everything else to.
I have been carrying Portugal with me for a while now.
I was born in Ponte de Lima, a small town in the north of Portugal, older than the country itself in some tellings, the kind of place where the river and the stone bridge that gives it its name have outlasted empires. I did my PhD at the University of Coimbra, one of the oldest universities in the world, and stayed there as a professor for most of my career, decades spent in a city built on the idea that some things are worth doing slowly and rigorously, whether that is teaching, writing, or verifying that a piece of software actually does what it claims to do.
Then, almost three years ago now, I moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, to join the UNC Charlotte. From a small country to a big one. From an old university to a young one. From a city where the past sits quietly in every stone, to a city that is still deciding what it wants to become.
I did not expect the move to change what I think about. It did.
What travels, what stays
My research has always lived under one big question: how do we know a system is dependable? Not “does it work in the demo”, but does it hold up under load, under attack, under the countless small failures that accumulate in any system complex enough to matter. Dependability benchmarking, robustness testing, security assessment, failure prediction: different tools, same underlying obsession. What survives contact with reality, and how would we know before it’s too late to matter?
It turns out that is also, quietly, a question about moving your life across an ocean.
What survives a career transplanted from one continent to another? Which habits of mind hold up, and which ones turn out to have been artifacts of a particular place rather than genuine principles? I have spent 25 years learning how to test whether a system is resilient. I did not expect to spend three years finding out, first-hand, what my own resilience was actually made of. Three years is long enough that the answer is no longer a first impression. It is closer to a result, though not one I am ready to write up in full just yet.
Alfred Adler, the psychiatrist whose work I have discovered only recently, somewhat unexpectedly for an engineer, argued that we are not really driven by our past. We are pulled forward by the goals we choose. I find that idea more useful with every year, and more difficult. Because saudade is, on its face, a very past-tense feeling. But I don’t think that’s quite what it is, for me. It is not that Portugal pulls me backward. It is that it comes with me, quietly, into whatever I choose to do next, the way a well-designed system carries its assumptions forward whether or not you remember writing them down.
Why this blog
This is where I intend to write about both halves of that sentence: the systems, and the assumptions.
Some posts here will be squarely technical: dependability and security, what fault injection actually teaches us, what happens when large language models start writing the code we are supposed to be verifying, and whether our field’s old tools are still the right ones for a very new problem. If you know my papers, you’ll recognize the terrain, just without the LaTeX.
Others will be more personal: notes on what it’s like to rebuild an academic career on new soil, on the strange particular grief and freedom of leaving a place you love for a place you’re still learning to, on the history of a small country that has spent five centuries punching above its weight and what that has quietly taught me about doing research that matters.
Most posts, I suspect, will end up being a bit of both, because I am increasingly convinced that they were never really separate questions in the first place.
Echoes of Saudade is my attempt to write both halves honestly, for as long as I have something worth saying.
Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.