# influences.sgit.ai — the influence register of Dinis Cruz > **An inspiration is something that moved you. An influence is something that *shaped the > work*** — and these are 25 of [Dinis Cruz's](about/index.html): 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](https://sgit.ai). More about him at [open-source.sgit.ai/about](https://open-source.sgit.ai/about/index.html) and [docs.diniscruz.ai/about](https://docs.diniscruz.ai/about.html), and [why this register is his to make](about/index.html).* *Source: · site v0.4.0 · markdown twin of the front page.* --- ## Eight ideas worth stealing 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. - **Bret Victor** *(traced)* — Immediate connection between creator and creation: a creator needs to see what they are making, as they make it. [The entry](register/bret-victor/index.html) - **Tim Berners-Lee & the Semantic Web** *(traced)* — Meaning should be machine-readable, so that independent parties can exchange it without agreeing on a schema first. [The entry](register/semantic-web/index.html) - **Design, with a capital D** *(traced, discovered)* — 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](register/design/index.html) - **Flow, and coding in the zone** *(traced)* — Clear goals, immediate feedback and a challenge matched to skill produce the zone, so a methodology's job is to protect those three conditions rather than to optimise throughput. [The entry](register/flow/index.html) - **Niklas Luhmann & the Zettelkasten** *(traced, discovered)* — 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](register/luhmann/index.html) - **Karl Popper & falsifiability** *(traced)* — A claim earns its status by being refutable. If nothing could show it to be wrong, it is not saying anything. [The entry](register/popper/index.html) - **Christopher Alexander** *(discovered)* — Code is a space that people inhabit, and a language of patterns is what lets a place be built by many hands and still be coherent. [The entry](register/christopher-alexander/index.html) - **Simon Wardley & Wardley Maps** *(traced)* — Situational awareness before strategy: draw the map before you argue about the move. [The entry](register/wardley/index.html) These are eight of [25](register/index.html). The rest run from a Canadian drummer to a 1945 essay about a machine nobody built. ## Five things a register like this is not supposed to contain 1. **An influence that is disagreed with.** 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. [Tim Berners-Lee & the Semantic Web](register/semantic-web/index.html) 2. **An influence that became a mandatory step in a pipeline.** 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](register/design/index.html) 3. **Influences he never claimed.** Seven entries were found by searching his work rather than by asking him. They are published as claims *about* him, and he is asked in public to strike the ones that do not belong. [The discovered tier](tiers/index.html#discovered) 4. **Entries with no evidence at all — published anyway.** Seven influences are on Dinis Cruz's own list and the search found nothing. One of them has no public record and never will. [Music, and playing in a band](register/music-and-band/index.html) 5. **Rows that say *absent*.** 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 gaps, as build specs](format/index.html#block5) ## How to read the register 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. - **TRACED — 15.** His own writing names them. The entry lists the files and the claim can be checked against them, which is all *traced* means. [The definition](tiers/index.html#traced) - **STATED — 7.** He says so and the written record is silent. Published as stubs with the research plan visible and a hypothesis clearly labelled as one. [The definition](tiers/index.html#stated) - **DISCOVERED — 3.** His work says so and he never did. Claims about him, awaiting his confirmation or his correction. [The definition](tiers/index.html#discovered) Then: [all 25 entries](register/index.html) · [the influence map](map/index.html), computed from the register rather than drawn · [seven blocks per entry](format/index.html) · [the wider library](library/index.html), a list of addresses rather than a collection. ## Articles - [**An influence is a claim you can check**](articles/an-influence-is-a-claim.html) *(2026-08-26)* — an introduction to this register: the one move that separates it from a reading list, the five ideas worth stealing from it, the three tiers and what moves an entry between them, and the four things the site cannot do. [All articles](articles/index.html). Each is a markdown file this site renders, so take the `.md` if you want to republish it. ## One thing to know before you believe any of 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: this is a register **about** Dinis Cruz, published **by** the project he founded, claiming his own work was shaped by a list of well-regarded thinkers. **Association is flattery, and it costs nothing to claim.** 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](provenance/index.html). --- All site content CC BY 4.0 — Dinis Cruz, with AI co-authorship (Claude, Anthropic). The anchor works belong to their authors and are linked, never rehosted.