The register
Every influence, in three tiers by how well the claim is evidenced.
25 entries:
15 traced,
7 stated,
3 discovered and still awaiting
Dinis Cruz's confirmation. The counts are computed from
data/influences.json on every build, not typed
— because tier movement is the one event this site exists to record.
An entry is a falsifiable claim, not an appreciation. Anyone can say Bret Victor was an influence. The register says which of Victor's patterns appear where in the estate, at which version, and which are still missing — specified precisely enough to build. The format, in full →
TRACED — 15
Corpus evidence exists today. The claim on the page can be checked against the files listed on it. The definition →
Bret Victor
The model entry, and the reason this site has a format at all. The register for Inventing on Principle was written as a working document before anyone asked what a site made of such documents should be called.
The entry →Simon Wardley & Wardley Maps
The deepest-traced influence in the corpus by volume — around 210 files — and the one whose material is entirely a sibling site's. This entry owns only the resonance: why a security person reorganised his thinking around an evolution axis.
The entry →Tim Berners-Lee & the Semantic Web
The format at its strongest, because this is an influence argued with. The dream of machine-readable meaning shaped the estate's graph work; the diagnosis of where the community went wrong shaped it just as much.
The entry →Graphs
The founding obsession, and the one link-out entry that owns something its sibling site does not: the personal history. Where graphs actually entered the thinking is an open question, and it is asked in public.
The entry →OWASP & the security community
Not a person and not a work: two decades inside an open community, and the Summit model in particular. The seed list's own phrasing was the cyber security community — an era, treated as an influence in its own right.
The entry →Flow, and coding in the zone
The best demonstration on this site that influences compose. Csikszentmihalyi supplies the state, Victor supplies the mechanism that sustains it, and the estate's development methodology is what was built from both.
The entry →Open source & its licences
A link-out entry that owns one thing the sibling site does not foreground: open source as personal formation. What two decades of releasing tools taught about licences as social contracts rather than legal ones.
The entry →Niklas Luhmann & the Zettelkasten
Never on Dinis Cruz's list. The corpus surfaced a dedicated published article mapping the slip-box to the estate's graph model — a discovered influence with more written evidence behind it than most of the stated ones.
The entry →Anders Ericsson & deliberate practice
The research behind the ten-thousand-hours number, attributed to the person who did it rather than the person who popularised it — a distinction the corpus is careful about, which is itself the tell.
The entry →Karl Popper & falsifiability
The shortest entry with the longest reach. Popper may be the influence that explains the shape of all the others' entries — including the trace table you are reading them in.
The entry →Linus Torvalds
Builder of two of the things this estate stands on. Nests under open source, and earns a standalone entry for one reason: Git is not just a tool here, it is the shape of an argument Dinis Cruz makes about education.
The entry →Bruce Schneier
Security as a systems and incentives problem before it is a technical one — and, in the corpus, the person who turns up in two arguments that have nothing to do with each other.
The entry →Design, with a capital D
Discovered by mining and confirmed by Dinis Cruz the day the commissioning pack shipped — the first DISCOVERED → confirmed transition, before the site existed. The strongest trace on this site: an influence that became a mandatory step in the pipeline.
The entry →The wider design canon
Rams, Vignelli, Norman, Eames, Müller-Brockmann, Tschichold, Aalto, Cooper, Krug, and Japanese design philosophy — mapped onto software explicitly in a live role definition, not cited as decoration.
The entry →Mihály Csíkszentmihályi
Named directly in the corpus with his flow criteria applied, which is why he gets a row of his own rather than a mention inside the flow entry. The state has a specification; the specification is what makes it engineerable.
The entry →STATED — 7
On Dinis Cruz's own list, and thin or absent in the corpus. Published as commitments with the research plan visible — the roadmap, not the debt. The definition →
Neil Peart & Rush
On Dinis Cruz's own list, and with zero corpus evidence. The most personal entry on the site and the one nobody else can research — which is exactly why it is published as a stub rather than quietly dropped.
The entry →Kevin Kelly's books
On Dinis Cruz's list, with no corpus evidence and three candidate anchors. The interesting question is whether the technium connects to Wardley's evolution axis or merely rhymes with it.
The entry →Simon Sinek — the golden circle
Why → How → What. On Dinis Cruz's list, with no corpus trace — and with one piece of circumstantial evidence that is either supporting or embarrassing, depending on the answer.
The entry →The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The essay's factual history belongs to the open-source sibling site. This entry owns only what it did to Dinis Cruz — which is exactly the part that is not written down anywhere.
The entry →David Rice — “Upon the Threshold of Opportunity”
An OWASP keynote, named by Dinis Cruz from memory. The one entry whose anchor is a specific recording that has to be found before it can be linked.
The entry →Music, and playing in a band
The most personal entry on the site, entirely awaiting Dinis Cruz's account — and carrying the hypothesis that, if it holds, explains one of the most-traced influences in the register.
The entry →Diverse and distributed teams
On Dinis Cruz's list as a practice rather than a person. The formative case is probably twenty years old and already in this register under another name.
The entry →DISCOVERED — 3
Surfaced by mining the corpus, never named by Dinis Cruz. The claim rests entirely on the trace table until he confirms or corrects it. The definition →
Christopher Alexander
Never named by Dinis Cruz. Surfaced by mining a live role definition, where the pattern-language idea is doing real work — a load-bearing citation, not a decorative one.
The entry →Team Topologies & Cynefin
Listed beside Wardley in a 2019 hiring post. One mention is enough to notice and not enough to claim — so this is a discovered stub, published at the strength of its evidence.
The entry →Vannevar Bush & the memex
The ancestor of the whole external-memory idea, and it entered this register the long way round — by being cited in an article about a modern implementation of the thing it predicted.
The entry →