---
title: Where the thinking came from: what the book takes from my influences register, influence by influence, where each one lands, and what the 2018 book had already written down about them
date: 2026-10-18
author: Dinis Cruz
summary: I keep a register of my influences at influences.sgit.ai: 25 people, works, communities and practices, each written as a claim you can check, not as a page of warm sentences. This article goes through it and says what the book should take from each, and where. Bret Victor's Inventing on Principle, the immediate connection between a creator and what they are making, belongs at the start, next to the wonder; the storyboards on this site are an example of it. Csikszentmihalyi's flow and Anders Ericsson's deliberate practice are the science behind the zone and behind learning as a skill. Wardley gives the frame, and Kevin Kelly's technium is its question about where technology wants to go. Karl Popper, and my own line that the problem with dogma is that you stop asking the question, belong in the chapter on questioning and evidence. Luhmann's slip box and Vannevar Bush's memex are the history of thinking in graphs and of writing for your future self. Linus Torvalds, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, open source and OWASP are how to learn and get hired in the open. Design, the design canon and Christopher Alexander are the villager's craft. Simon Sinek's golden circle is the 2018 book's own question of why. And there are entries only I can fill in, Neil Peart, playing in a band, a keynote by David Rice, which the editor's interviews should capture. Reading the register against the 2018 book also found something useful the other way round: the 2018 book already wrote down several things the register lists as unknown, starting with what The Cathedral and the Bazaar did to me. And there is a lesson for the reader in the format itself: know where your ideas come from, and keep your own register.
version: v0.2.7
tags: influences, bret-victor, flow, popper, wardley, open-source, design, gen-z-book, article
status: published
---

## In short {#in-short}

- **My influences are in a register, as claims you can check.** 25 entries at influences.sgit.ai, each tied to where it shows up in my work.
- **Most of them have a place in the book.** Influence by influence, the table below says where.
- **Bret Victor belongs at the start.** The immediate connection between a creator and what they make is the wonder the book opens with.
- **Flow and deliberate practice are the science of the zone and of learning.** Csikszentmihalyi and Ericsson.
- **Popper belongs in the chapter on questioning.** A claim earns its status by being refutable.
- **The 2018 book already wrote down things the register calls unknown.** The Cathedral and the Bazaar, the technium, Inventing on Principle.
- **Some entries only I can fill in.** Neil Peart, playing in a band, a David Rice keynote: interview material.
- **The format is a lesson for the reader.** Know where your ideas come from; keep your own register.

## Why influences belong in this book {#why}

A book for people starting out should show that ideas have a lineage. Nothing in this book came from nowhere: the frame is Wardley's, the zone is Csikszentmihalyi's, the way I work in the open came from open source and OWASP. Showing that does three things for the reader: it gives them a reading list worth having; it shows them how to credit the people they learn from; and it shows that the people who seem to have original ideas are mostly good at connecting other people's, which is the multidisciplinary edge again.

But I did not want a page of "books that shaped me". So the register at [influences.sgit.ai](https://influences.sgit.ai) makes one move, which its first article puts in a sentence: "An entry in this register is a falsifiable claim about my codebase." Each entry names an anchor (the one work that did the shaping), the principle it gave me, where that principle shows up in my work, and where it is still absent. Some entries are traced, with evidence; some are stated, on my list but still thin; some were discovered by mining my own writing, and are waiting for me to confirm them.

## What the book takes, influence by influence {#table}

| Influence | The principle, in one line | Where it lands in the book |
|---|---|---|
| **Bret Victor**, *Inventing on Principle* (2012) | A creator needs to see what they are making, as they make it | The opening (wonder); how to work with agents; the storyboards as an example |
| **Mihály Csíkszentmihályi**, *Flow* (1990), and coding in the zone | Clear goals, immediate feedback and a challenge matched to skill produce the zone | The zone, in the opening and in learning |
| **Anders Ericsson**, *Peak* (2016) | Expertise comes from structured practice with immediate feedback at the edge of your ability, not from hours | Learning is a lifelong skill |
| **Simon Wardley** and Wardley maps | Draw the map before you argue about the move | The frame, throughout |
| **Kevin Kelly**, the technium | Technology evolves with tendencies of its own | Next to Wardley's evolution: where technology wants to go |
| **Karl Popper**, falsifiability | A claim that nothing could prove wrong is not saying anything | Questioning, evidence and the record |
| **Bruce Schneier** | Security failures are usually incentive failures | Security for the agent era |
| **Niklas Luhmann**, the slip box | External memory works as a thinking partner when its notes are small, addressed and linked | I think in graphs; your future self |
| **Vannevar Bush**, *As We May Think* (1945) | The mind works by association, and external memory should too | The history of the link, before the web |
| **Tim Berners-Lee** and the semantic web | Meaning should be machine-readable; I argue it comes from the edges, not the nodes | Graphs, memory and knowledge |
| **Graphs** | Structure is edges | Graphs, throughout |
| **Linus Torvalds**, Linux and Git | Tools that decentralise trust change how people can work together | Open source; Git and GitHub as your CV |
| **Eric Raymond**, *The Cathedral and the Bazaar* (1997) | Release early, release often, and let users find what is wrong | Open source; publish, publish, publish |
| **Open source** and its licences | The licence decides who can build on your work and what they owe | Open source; the licence of this book |
| **OWASP** and the security community | Knowledge compounds fastest in the open | Act as the job you want; community and mentors |
| **Diverse and distributed teams** | Distribution makes thinking explicit; diversity stops a team agreeing on the wrong thing | Centres of gravity in a team |
| **Design**, "design is how it works" | Design is how the thing works, not decoration | The villager's craft |
| **The design canon** | Every element must earn its place | The villager's craft; the second version has to be designed |
| **Christopher Alexander**, *A Pattern Language* (1977) | Code is a space people inhabit | The town planner's craft |
| **Simon Sinek**, *Start With Why* (2009) | Purpose before mechanism | The opening; why the book exists |
| **Team Topologies and Cynefin** | The shape of the team decides the shape of the system | Context for the town planner; probably not a chapter |
| **David Rice**, *Upon the Threshold of Opportunity*, OWASP AppSec USA 2010 | Security risk as pollution: measured, regulated, then designed out | The opening's optimism; security for the agent era |
| **Neil Peart** and Rush | Technical mastery in service of meaning | Craft; needs my own account |
| **Music, and playing in a band** | Playing together in real time is collaborative flow | Flow and teams; needs my own account |

The principles are mine, rewritten in one line from each entry; the full entries, with their evidence and their gaps, are on the register.

## The opening, and learning {#opening}

Bret Victor's talk is the model entry of the register, and its principle is the one I most want a reader to feel early: a creator needs to see what they are making, as they make it. Every step between you and the thing you are making, a compile, a deploy, a refresh, is a place where an idea can die. Generative AI removes a lot of those steps, which is part of the wonder the book starts with. And this site is an example: the storyboards are redrawn the moment their data changes. The 2018 book had an outline for the talk, with a note that is very much me: "print this and read it".

Flow is the science behind the zone that the 2018 introduction hoped readers would find: clear goals, immediate feedback, and a challenge matched to your skill. Csikszentmihalyi named programming as one of the activities that can induce it. And Anders Ericsson is the science behind learning as a skill: expertise comes from structured practice with feedback, at the edge of what you can do, not from the number of hours. The register is careful to credit Ericsson for the research behind the ten-thousand-hours number, rather than the person who popularised it, and the book should be too.

## Questioning and evidence {#questioning}

Popper's principle is short: a claim earns its status by being refutable; if nothing could show it to be wrong, it is not saying anything. It is the shape of the register itself, and it belongs in the next article, on questioning and asking for the evidence. With it goes a line of mine the register quotes, from a section I wrote about education: "the problem with dogma is not that it exists, but that you stop asking the question." That is the first line on the 2018 cover, question everything, made into a method. Schneier adds the security version: before asking how something failed, ask who bears the cost of the failure.

## Graphs, memory and your future self {#graphs}

I think in graphs, and the register has the history of that. Vannevar Bush described, in 1945, a machine for following trails of association between documents, decades before the web. Niklas Luhmann kept a slip box of small, numbered, densely linked notes that grew its own structure, which I have described as a self-organising knowledge graph on paper. The semantic web shaped my graph work as much by what I disagree with as by what I took. These are the background to the 2018 chapters on backing up your life and talking to yourself digitally, and to the newsroom's graphs.

## Open source, community and getting hired {#open}

The 2018 Open Source chapter already says what *The Cathedral and the Bazaar* did to me: "my paradigm shift into an Open Source mindset happened 20 years ago after I read" it. Torvalds built two of the things all of this stands on, Linux and Git, and Git is the shape of an argument I make about education: a tool that decentralises trust. OWASP is where I learned that knowledge compounds in the open, and the 2018 OWASP chapter told readers to find jobs through contributions, which is [act as the job you want](https://newsroom.sgit.ai/articles/act-as-the-job-you-want.html) in its first form. These belong in the parts on open source and on getting the job.

## The villager's craft {#design}

Design, in Jobs's sense that design is how it works, became a mandatory step in how my agents build interfaces: every change has to be simpler, and reverting it should feel worse. The wider design canon (Rams, Norman, Vignelli and others) says every element must earn its place, which applies to an API or a command line as much as to a screen. Christopher Alexander's pattern language is where software design patterns came from. This is the material for the villager, whose second version has to be designed, and for the town planner who has to live in the code.

## Purpose, and optimism {#why-optimism}

Simon Sinek's golden circle, why before how before what, is on my list and was a 2018 outline, *Start with why*. The 2018 introduction asked the same question of the logos it opened with: "Why is the **why** important?" The book should start with why, which is what [you are lucky to be here](/articles/lucky-to-be-here.html) does.

A keynote by David Rice, the author of *Geekonomics*, argued that security is an opportunity rather than a fear industry. The talk is *Upon the Threshold of Opportunity*, his keynote at OWASP AppSec USA 2010; the [full recording is on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/15506033), and it is also on YouTube in three parts. I wrote about it in December 2016, in [the pollution analogy](https://diniscruz.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-pollution-analogy.html): "When talking about risks, I prefer to use an pollution analogy rather than technical debt." Pollution is the unintended negative consequences of creating something, which is what security risk is; society went from accepting pollution, to regulating it, to designing it out, and application security should get to the third. And one line from that post belongs in this book: "security doesn't need to say no all time." It made enough of an impression that the OWASP Summit in 2011 had a working session on [how to present his "Pollution keynote" worldwide](https://wiki.owasp.org/index.php/Summit_2011_Working_Sessions/Session088): an analogy between what society went through with pollution and the state of application security. It belongs next to the book's argument for ignoring the doom.

## Entries only I can fill in {#mine}

Some entries have no evidence in my writing at all, because they are personal: Neil Peart and Rush, technical mastery in service of meaning; playing in a band, which the register guesses was my first experience of collaborative flow; working in diverse and distributed teams. They are published as stubs rather than dropped, and they are exactly what the editor's interviews should capture, because nobody else can research them.

## What the 2018 book gives back to the register {#back}

Reading the register against the 2018 book found things the register lists as missing that the book had already written down:

- **The Cathedral and the Bazaar.** The register's stub says what it did to me is not written down anywhere; the 2018 Open Source chapter writes it down: when it happened, and Raymond's nineteen lessons.
- **Kevin Kelly.** The register has three candidate anchors; the 2018 outline *Technium* points at *What Technology Wants*.
- **Inventing on Principle.** The 2018 outline adds Light Table, which the talk inspired, and "print this and read it".
- **Simon Sinek.** The 2018 outline *Start with why* is evidence the register does not have yet.
- **Diverse teams.** The 2018 outline *Why diversity matters* is a first version of that entry.
- **A Mathematician's Lament** and *The Cathedral and the Bazaar* are both on the 2018 draft *Books to read*.

These should go to the register as a brief, so that each entry can cite the 2018 book.

## An exercise for the reader {#exercise}

The format is a lesson in itself. Pick the three people or works that have shaped how you think. For each, write the one work that did it, the principle you took from it in one sentence anyone could use, where that principle shows up in something you have made, and where it does not yet. That is a register; it is also a CV that shows how you think, and a reading list for the next person.

## The brief {#brief}

For the editor. Read `team/editor/role.md`, this article and the register at influences.sgit.ai first.

1. **Add an influence column to the chapter map**: the influences behind each chapter, from the table above. Done when every chapter that draws on one names it.
2. **Plan a box per chapter, "where this comes from"**, naming its influence and linking the register entry; and an appendix, *Where the thinking came from*, as the reading list. Done when the chapter map marks the boxes and the appendix has an outline.
3. **Real people appear as quote cards, not as cast members.** Done when the storyboard guidance says so.
4. **Interview me on the stubs**: Neil Peart, playing in a band, diverse and distributed teams, and what David Rice's keynote changed for me. Done when the script is in your `briefs/` and the transcripts are in the vault.
5. **Put the reader's exercise in the book**, at the end of the learning part. Done when the chapter map places it.

For the journalist:

6. **Write the brief for the register**: the six findings above, each with its 2018 file, for the influences site to take in. Done when I have approved it and it is delivered to that repository.

Questions for me, kept apart:

- Can the 2018 findings be sent to the influences site as a brief?
- Is *What Technology Wants* the right anchor for Kevin Kelly?

## What this does not claim {#limits}

- **The register's tiers are its own.** Traced, stated or discovered is the register's assessment of its evidence; this article does not re-assess it.
- **The one-line principles are paraphrases.** The register's entries have the exact wording and the evidence.
- **"Where it lands" is a proposal.** The editor's chapter map decides.
- **The six findings are from the 2018 files**, read on 18 October 2026; the register has not yet seen them.
- **Stubs are hypotheses.** The register says so, and the book should not treat them as findings until I have told the story.

If you keep a list of your own influences, or try the exercise, write to [agent@riskmandate.ai](mailto:agent@riskmandate.ai).

## Where this comes from {#sources}

A message of mine on 18 October 2026 asking for a review of [influences.sgit.ai](https://influences.sgit.ai), written up by this site's journalist, `gen-z.journalist`, in my voice. The argument and the editorial responsibility are mine.

The register: the repository [SGit-AI/SGit-AI__Website__Influences](https://github.com/SGit-AI/SGit-AI__Website__Influences), read on 18 October 2026: `data/influences.json` (25 entries, their tiers, anchors and principles), the entry for Bret Victor, and the article *An influence is a claim you can check*, quoted word for word. The 2018 quotations are from book v1.0.0 (the Introduction; *Open Source*, "The Cathedral and the Bazaar"; *OWASP*, "Find jobs via OWASP contributions") and from the drafts in `v1/content/`: `5.concepts/inventing-on-principle.md`, `10.misc/technium.md`, `4.life-patterns/start-with-why.md`, `4.life-patterns/why-diversity-matters.md` and `10.misc/books-to-read.md`. The David Rice recording is the one I shared afterwards: [the full keynote on Vimeo](https://vimeo.com/15506033) and [part 2 of 3 on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8sLSwnId9c), with my post [the pollution analogy](https://diniscruz.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-pollution-analogy.html) of 11 December 2016, quoted word for word, with the OWASP wiki's [Summit 2011 working session](https://wiki.owasp.org/index.php/Summit_2011_Working_Sessions/Session088) on presenting it.