Hiya, I am Nathan, a software engineering researcher, currently working as a post-doc at the University of Victoria with prof. Margaret-Anne Storey and prof. Neil Ernst. I defended my PhD cum laude at the Software Engineering and Technology group of the Eindhoven University of Technology, under the supervision of Alexander Serebrenik and Nicole Novielli. My research interest is Human Aspects of Software Engineering, and I believe that we can help software engineers write better software through a better understanding of human aspects.

For my PhD, I studied how software engineers express emotions and sentiment and how the expression of emotions and sentiment influences Software Development. This includes understanding how researchers study emotions and sentiment in software engineering, studying the tools used to classify emotions and sentiment in text automatically, and studying how the expression of emotions and sentiment influences the practice of software engineering. For the full details, you can find my PhD Thesis here.

For a complete overview of my work, please check out the list of publications I have co-authored. In addition to the research into sentiment and emotions, I’ve also studied bots, code reviews, and continuous integration, error handling by Apple Swift developers.

Background

In 2015 I received my bachelors in Software Engineering from Fontys University of Applied Science, after which I enrolled in a pre-master and master’s in Computer Science and Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. In May 2019 I received my masters Cum Laude (the thesis has been awarded first place at the VERSEN master thesis awards, see awards) and in October 2019, I started my PhD-TA at TU/e. Where I defended my PhD Cum Laude on the 31st of October 2024.

During my master’s, I worked part-time as a DevOps engineer at Spendlab Technology. While there, I’ve worked on implementing a big-data system that can efficiently process and analyze large amounts of payment data.