I am Nathan, a software engineering researcher currently working as a postdoctoral researcher 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 work has been recognized with the MSR Distinguished Doctoral Research Award, a nomination for the 2025 Eindhoven University of Technology Best PhD Thesis, First Runner-up for the 2025 Informatics Europe Best Dissertation Award, and Third place at the VERSEN PhD Thesis Award.

My research investigates the human and sociotechnical aspects of software engineering: how to capture the productivity benefits of new tooling, particularly AI, without losing the skills, judgment, and collaborative practices that software engineering depends on. I approach this question through a sociotechnical lens grounded in affect, emotions, and decision-making, and I rely on mixed methods because only a combination of qualitative and quantitative work can accurately reveal how tools reshape software practice.

For my PhD, I studied how software engineers express emotions and sentiment and how that expression influences software development, ranging from how researchers study emotions and sentiment in software engineering, to the tools used to classify them automatically, to how their expression affects day-to-day engineering practice. The full thesis is available here. My current postdoctoral work extends this sociotechnical lens to AI in software engineering, where I’ve found that reliance on AI can lead to emotional disengagement that hinders skill development in novice developers, and that AI is disrupting core social practices such as code review.

For a complete overview, please see my list of publications. Alongside the work on emotions, sentiment, and AI, I’ve also studied bots, code reviews, continuous integration, and 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.