Dinis Cruz
This is his influence register. Every entry on this site is a claim about the same person's thinking and the same person's code — which is what makes the claims checkable, and also what makes them worth being sceptical about.
The short version. Twenty-five years in security and software: former CISO, former OWASP board member, organiser of the OWASP Summits, creator of the O2 Platform, and founder of sgit.ai and a handful of companies that publish their source and, unusually, their strategy. Currently Chief Architect of GenAI Innovation. Nearly everything he builds ships open source — which is the reason a register like this one is even possible: the codebase the claims point at is public.
Read more, elsewhere
This page is deliberately short. The full account lives on two pages that are maintained as the canonical ones, and this site links to them rather than keeping a third copy that would go stale — the same rule the wider library runs on.
Why this register exists
Everyone has a list of the people who shaped them. Almost nobody can show the shaping. This site is an attempt at the second thing.
The format came before the site did. Dinis wrote an immediate-connection register for Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle as a working document about a piece of software he was building — not as an essay about Victor — and only afterwards asked what a site made of such documents should be called. The seven blocks are that document, canonised.
His own words on the commission are the site's brief in one sentence: no verbatim reproduction of anybody's work, detailed sections explaining what and why from each one really resonates, and examples of where it was applied in practice. That last clause is the whole difference between this and a reading list, and it is why every entry ends in a table of paths and version numbers.
Whose voice you are reading
Three voices, and the site keeps them apart on purpose:
| Where | Whose |
|---|---|
| Block 2 of every entry — In his own words | Dinis Cruz's, quoted from his own articles, briefs and registers with the file named. First person is the house style on this site and nowhere else in the network: what resonates with me and why is the genre, and paraphrasing it into corporate third person would destroy the evidence. |
| Everything else on an entry | The site's reading of the evidence, written by an AI agent from a commissioning brief with him reviewing and directing. Where a principle is a hypothesis constructed from public material rather than from anything he has written, the entry says so in the principle itself. |
| The articles | First person throughout, and written to be read as his. |
And a fourth thing that is nobody's voice here: the anchor works. The talks, books, essays, keynotes and records that did the influencing belong to their authors and are linked rather than reproduced — a rule the release gate enforces rather than the site merely stating.
Why to be sceptical of all of it
A person publishing the list of thinkers who shaped him is doing something with an obvious pull to it: association is flattery, and it costs nothing to claim. Saying that Victor, Popper and Alexander are in your intellectual lineage makes your work sound better without making it better.
What is done about that, and none of it makes the incentive go away: every entry names the files it stands on; the tier system separates evidence from assertion visibly; seven entries are claims about him that he never made and is asked in public to strike; and the counts are computed rather than typed.
The full participant disclosure How the register was built
Correct it
The most useful thing anyone can do with this site is find a row that is wrong. A trace row claims a pattern appears at a named path at a named version; if it does not, that is a defect and it should be reported like one — the repository is public, releases and failed builds included.
And the entries most in need of him rather than of a reader: the seven briefing threads, two of which — Neil Peart, and the years spent playing in a band — nobody else can research.