Personal Journal № 01

OPTIMISTIC APOCALYPTARIAN.

I’m Carlo Kruger: agilist, cook, cat-lover, coffee snob, aka grumpycat, and AI enthusiast. I write about the technical, organisational, and cultural systems that make software delivery work worse.

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Current inquiry

How do capable software teams become late, brittle, and stuck firefighting?

I’m tracing the technical, organisational, and cultural systems that turn ordinary delivery pressure into recurring failure. These essays are working evidence, not a consultant funnel.

The blog.

— 12 essays
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Plate from the Lienzo de Tlaxcala showing Cortés and La Malinche seated, receiving Mexica emissaries carrying feathered shields and standards.
ai culture

11 JUL 2026

AI Is an Outside Context Problem

AI is an Outside Context Problem for the modern corporation. Culture and organisational structure, not technology, will decide who survives it.
Black-and-white street scene with gridlocked cars beside a flowing stream of scooters in Saigon traffic.
culture agile

02 MAY 2026

The Car Makes Us Bad Systems Thinkers

Traffic flow as a metaphor for systems thinking, fairness, queues, local optimization and organizational behavior.
an engineer in front of a white board solving a problem
culture leadership

16 JAN 2026

Case Study: Engineering Management in Action

A case study in diagnosing an engineering team in crisis, finding the systemic causes of delivery failure, and designing a practical intervention plan.