An inspiration is something that moved you. An influence is something that shaped the work — and these are 25 of Dinis Cruz's: the people, works, topics and things behind twenty-five years of his software, with the idea worth taking from each and the exact place in his code where you can check that it landed.
Twenty-five years in security and software · former CISO · former OWASP board member and Summit organiser · founder of sgit.ai · the record ↗ · the research hub ↗ · why this register is his to make →
Each one distilled to a single sentence you can apply without having read the book or watched the talk — which is the test the format sets. Every entry behind them names where the idea shows up in real code, at which version, and where it is still missing.
Immediate connection between creator and creation — a creator needs to see what they are making, as they make it.
The entry, and where it lands →Meaning should be machine-readable, so that independent parties can exchange it without agreeing on a schema first.
The entry, and where it lands →Design is not decoration applied after engineering — it is how the thing works. Start from what the person is trying to do and work backwards to the simplest interaction that does it.
The entry, and where it lands →Clear goals, immediate feedback and a challenge matched to skill produce the zone — so a methodology's job is to protect those three conditions, not to optimise throughput.
The entry, and where it lands →External memory works as a thinking partner when its units are atomic, uniquely addressed, densely linked and allowed to grow structure rather than being filed into one.
The entry, and where it lands →A claim earns its status by being refutable. If nothing could show it to be wrong, it is not saying anything.
The entry, and where it lands →Code is a space that people inhabit. A pattern is a named solution to a recurring problem in a context — and a language of patterns is what lets a place be built by many hands and still be coherent.
The entry, and where it lands →Situational awareness before strategy — draw the map before you argue about the move, and the map is a falsifiable claim about position and movement rather than a picture of your opinions.
The entry, and where it lands →These are eight of 25. The rest run from a Canadian drummer to a 1945 essay about a machine nobody built.
An influence usually arrives as one line you cannot put down. These are the ones on record — quoted from the work they appear in, and never at length: this site links the anchor works rather than reproducing them.
Half the viewer's strongest features were already unknowing implementations of its demos, which is evidence the instinct and the principle agree; this register makes the agreement deliberate, so the next agent extends it on purpose rather than by luck.
The finding that started the whole register: patterns from a 2012 talk turning up in a codebase years later, built on instinct, by people who had not connected the two. The entry →
The Semantic Web community identified the right problem… But the community made a subtle mistake in practice. They ended up attaching meaning to nodes rather than deriving meaning from edges.
An influence argued with, in public. Attach meaning to a node and everyone must agree before anyone can use it; derive it from edges and two parties can disagree about what a thing is while agreeing how it relates. The entry →
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.
Sixteen words that this estate turned into a gate. The Jonathan Ive test — is it simpler? would reverting feel worse? — is a mandatory validator for every interface change. The entry →
It centers on preserving developer flow state while leveraging LLMs for code generation.
Not a mention in a rationale section — the first line of the methodology. Csikszentmihalyi supplies the state, Victor the mechanism, and this is what was built from both. The entry →
Luhmann's Zettelkasten was a self-organizing knowledge graph on paper… atomic, uniquely identified, densely linked, emergent in structure, scalable and lifelong
Six properties named in one sentence, and the hard one is emergent: nothing is filed under anything, and the structure is a consequence of the linking. A paper slip-box got there first. The entry →
the problem with dogma is not that it exists, but that you stop asking the question.
The same influence, applied to education policy rather than developer tooling — under a section header that names him. An idea that only shows up where you first met it has not been absorbed. The entry →
The interesting parts are the ones a page of warm sentences about your heroes would never survive.
The Semantic Web entry credits the ambition and then says exactly where the community went wrong — meaning attached to nodes rather than derived from edges. Two rows of its trace table record the influence being inverted rather than implemented. Influence is engagement, not agreement, and an idea you argued with for twenty years has shaped you more than one you nodded at.
Tim Berners-Lee & the Semantic Web →Somebody read that good design is invisible — that you only notice it by going back to the previous version and feeling the loss — and turned it into two questions every interface change has to answer: is it simpler? would reverting feel worse? Not a quote on a wall. A gate that can fail.
Design, with a capital D →Seven entries here were found by searching the work rather than asking the author — Luhmann, Christopher Alexander, Vannevar Bush and others turned up doing real work in documents that were about something else. They are published as claims about him, and he is asked in public to strike the ones that do not belong. A register that can only add is not falsifiable in the direction that matters.
The discovered tier →Seven influences are on Dinis Cruz's own list and the search found nothing. One of them — the years he spent playing in a band — has no public record and never will, and it carries the hypothesis that, if true, gives the most-instrumented idea on this whole site an origin nobody wrote down. These entries publish an empty evidence block and a research plan. The roadmap, not the debt.
Music, and playing in a band →Every entry lists the patterns from its anchor work that the codebase does not implement — written precisely enough to pick up as a work item. The design entry's last row: the simplicity test is scoped to visual changes, and most of what anyone touches is an API, a CLI or a file format. An influence page that names what is missing is provenance and backlog in one document.
The gaps, as build specs →Twenty-five entries, sorted by how well the claim is evidenced rather than by how much they mattered. The tier is a statement about evidence, not importance — a stated influence may well be the deepest one on the list.
The work names them. The entry lists the files and the claim can be checked against them — which is all traced means, and it is still not proof that the talk caused the pattern.
He says so and the record is silent. Published as stubs with the research plan visible and a hypothesis clearly labelled as one.
The record says so and he never did. Claims about him, awaiting his confirmation — or his correction.
Grouped by tier, from Bret Victor to Vannevar Bush by way of OWASP, a paper slip-box and a drummer. Every one of them a page you can argue with.
The register →They are not a list. Bush → Luhmann → graphs; Victor × Csikszentmihalyi → one methodology; Wardley → Popper → the format of this very page. Computed from the register, never drawn.
The graph →Anchor · Dinis Cruz's words · the principle · the trace table · the gaps as build specs · a checklist · the wider library. Invented as a working document before anyone thought of a site.
How an entry is written →Every book, talk, essay and record named across the register, in one place, each with a line on what it adds. A list of addresses, not a collection — nothing here is hosted.
Where to go next →Longer pieces that make an argument across several entries. The register is the reference; these are the reading.
All articles → Each one is a markdown file this site renders, so take the .md if you want to republish it.
A trace table cannot show causation. It shows that a pattern from a talk appears in a codebase. It cannot show that the talk put it there — and the finding that started this whole register is exactly that distinction: half the estate's strongest features turned out to be unknowing implementations of a talk's demos, built on instinct years later by people who had not connected the two. The honest claim is that the instinct and the principle agree. It is weaker than this shaped the work, and it is the one the evidence supports.
There is also an obvious conflict of interest, and it is worth naming on the way in rather than being caught at it later: 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.
The defence is the only one available — every claim here is checkable by somebody who does not share the incentive. How the register was built, what the release gate refuses to publish, and the four things this site cannot do →