etiennex

Etienne de Bruin · CTO coach · compulsive builder

The hardest problems in tech aren’t technical.

I’m Etienne de Bruin. I’ve spent twenty years proving it: ten holding the CTO seat, ten coaching the people who do. And I still ship code most days.

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2026 so far 16 essays 1 new book 12 live products 2,000+ readers
01Shipped · MMXXVI

The ledger

Positioning is what you say. Proof is what shipped. This is what shipped.

Full essay archive/Substack archive

02For the loneliness of the seat

Writing

For tech leaders navigating complexity, AI disruption, and the loneliness of the seat.

White paper

Life Loops: what world models miss about moving through time

World models capture what an agent knows. Life Loops propose the missing layer: what it is like to be the agent doing the modeling. Temporal texture, energy gradients, accumulated residue.

Read the white paper →

“The shift is not ideological. It is economical.”

The MaaS Manifesto

The CTO Substack

An essay most weeks. 2,000+ technology leaders read it. The seat is lonely; the reading list doesn’t have to be.

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03A coach who stops building starts guessing

Builds

A coach who stops building starts guessing. I refuse to guess.

#ProjectWhat it isWhereStatus
01GalleyBook publishing where an AI guide interviews the book out of yougalley.presslive
02CTO CompassStrategic planning that translates business goals into technical executionctocompass.comlive
03VegaFault-tolerant AI agent orchestration for Go, Erlang-style supervisionv3ga.devlive
04EngramOne brain: memory that humans and agents can both recall fromengram.cxlive
05QuireThe peer-vetted register of CTOs, a soulbound credential on Basequire.cxlive
06EchelonThe operating system for climbing companies, built on the Levels Gridechelon.cxlive
07AnvilTechnical take-home exercises that still mean something in the AI eraanvil.cxlive
08ConversationEmail as conversations with people, not a pile of inboxesconversation.cxlive
09CoherentA goal surface for a spike-and-crash creative mindcoherent.cxlive
10ZipWatchLocal government ordinances in plain English, resolved by your addresszipwatch.comlive
11MusolistClassifieds for musicians since 2004, reborn with an arcade heartmusolist.comlive
12DunbarA social network hard-capped at 150 people, CLI firstin devlab
13BraidVersion control rebuilt for concurrent agents: no branches, no PRsin devlab

Plus sixty-odd repos of experiments: a programming language for the agentic era, a distributed-consciousness daemon, radio jingle generators, an arcade game. The workshop is never quiet.

04All of it starts with a conversation

Work with me

Three ways in. All of them start with a conversation.

CTO Excellence in 100 Days The CTO’s Refactor · 2026

The books

One for your first hundred days in the seat. One for what the seat becomes when AI makes output cheap. Written the hard way, then the new way: the second was drafted with Galley.

05Johannesburg → Salt Lake City

About

Shaped by the advent of computing, the fall of apartheid, and the birth of the internet.

San Diego 2000–25 Salt Lake City 2025–now Aachen 1997–2000 Johannesburg 1972–84 Vereeniging 1984–89 Stellenbosch 1990–97

Johannesburg, then Vereeniging, then Stellenbosch, then Aachen, then two decades in San Diego, and since 2025, Salt Lake City. CTO of a high-growth SaaS company from 2005 to 2015, which is where I learned that the hardest problems in technology organizations are almost never technical.

Since then: 7CTOs, the EXE coaching practice, the CTO Levels framework, The CTO Podcast, two books, one Substack, and an unreasonable number of side projects. I still play in bands; Musolist exists because finding bandmates was the first problem I ever wanted software to solve.

The optimization target, always: unbridled joy.

The loneliest seat in tech deserves better company.

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