Adriaan Rol’s Homepage#
2023-08-21 - Good UX: Non-thinking versus minimizing cognitive load
A common design principle is “don’t make me think”. It might even capture an essential aspect of good (user) design. However, pushed to its extreme, it can lead to some very bad UX and frustrations. In this blog post, I will argue for adopting “minimize cognitive load” as an alternative design principle.
2023-02-14 - Enabling giscus comments on all posts
To avoid having to add the giscus comment snippet of the previous post to every post, I want to add it to the page template. To do this, we first need to set up Sphinx to look for custom templates, figure out a good starting template, and then modify it to our liking.
2023-02-12 - Allowing comments using giscus
As my personal website is basically a blog, I’d like readers to be able to comment on it. Previously, I used Disqus for it, but I don’t really like the look and feel of it, and when googling around I found that it is also obnoxious with tracking, adverts and generally disrespecting privacy. One of the alternatives that I was quite charmed by was giscus, a solution that uses GitHub Discussions to power the comments and reactions to my blog posts. In this post, I’ll show how to set up giscus for my Sphinx based website.
2023-02-11 - Migrating the website to Sphinx + ABlog
Last week I migrated my website from Nikola ( see my post from 2020 )to Sphinx + ABlog. Although it might look a little different than before, the functionality is essentially the same so you might wonder why I decided to do this migration.
2022-05-05 - Obsidian, making me love taking notes again
I have recently fallen in love with a new note-taking app: Obsidian. Obsidian is a note-taking app that brands itself as a “second brain”. It is a knowledge base build on top of a local folder of markdown files. In practice, this combination makes it both one of the simplest, and one of the most powerful note-taking apps I have ever used.
2021-11-19 - A Practical Guide for Building Superconducting Quantum Devices
I’m very excited that our tutorial on cQED, the technology behind superconducting qubits, got published in PRX Quantum today! I hope this work will make it easier for anyone looking to get into this fascinating field.
2021-07-29 - Toekomstmuziek podcast
I was interviewed for the “Toekomstmuziek” podcast on quantum computing by Eveline Meijer of AG connect together with Anne-Marije Zwerver of QuTech. On the question when can we get started with the quantum computer.
2021-07-21 - Accelerating quantum computer developments
With Orange Quantum Systems, and our partners in the Dutch Quantum ecosystem we have published a paper in the special quantum industry issue of EPJ Quantum Technology on accelerating the development of quantum computers. In this paper, we present the product development approach and roadmap for quantum computers, based on superconducting circuits as an example.
2021-04-22 - Quantum Delft webinar on Quantify
I gave a presentation at the Quantum Delft webinar on Quantify, and our work on running variational algorithms (VQE) on the Quantum Inspire. Quantify, is an open-source framework for operating quantum computers in the NISQ era developed by Orange Quantum Systems and Qblox
2020-12-05 - Setting up a new python project with Cookiecutter
Every so often, I need to set up a new repository for a python project including a lot of boilerplate. Because you only set it up once I always spend a lot of time googling best practices and reinventing the wheel. To resolve this once and for all I decided to make a template tailored to my own preferences.
