Lars Kruse

Software is Eating the world - we need more software!

My LinkedIn profile @Lakruzz is continuously updated, so if you’re looking for the short version - go look there. This CV is a more elaborate version; not just exposing what I did, but also offering some insight into who I am and why I did it.

The CV is built up chronologically. It’s a fine way to tell the story about me, starting with my early interests and career and how I developed into becoming what I am today. But if you read this CV then maybe, as a first impression, you’re probably more interested in the summary of it all. So I’ll start with that.

Summary

In a nutshell; I’m a Software Developer, a business developer, a transformational leader and a passionate communicator.

Since the beginning of my career in the late 90’ies, I’ve worked mostly as a professional consultant in companies which I founded (and funded) myself. In more recent times I’ve also explored a position as adjunct professor at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology and a position s an employed business developer inside a large management consultant bureau to build and develop a tech division, specifically within the realm of DevOps and Continuous Delivery.

Early in my career I was engaged in software development and continued onwards to configuration management, version control systems and all sorts of Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) supporting tools. I specialized in programmable IT infrastructure, software process automation; branching strategies, Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery, developer collaboration platforms, DevOps and DevX. I’m a lean devotee, constantly on a quest to build quality into software, as opposed to glue it on after it’s finished.

I’ve worked in numerous industries, but especially three segments stand out; manufacturing industry, medical devices and finance. I’m a lean advocate. And I know everything agile. But my heart beats for lean software development. I have an exceptionally good understanding of bridging the concepts of lean manufacturing and product development with contemporary software development. I’m advocating transformational leadership, long-term system thinking, kanban and continuous improvement.

In 2007 I co-founded a consulting business specialized in Continuous Delivery and DevOps and grew it to 50+ people in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. I’ve started two other consulting/service companies, one within SaaS and Serverless technologies and one within branding, design and storytelling. As a Business developer I soon realized that tech and processes was merely an object or an instrument for my career. My core interest is in people, leadership, inspiration, motivation, didactics and mentorship. To explore and qualify specifically in this field I spent two years pursuing a Master in Business Coaching. From my youth I also hold a Master in Computer Science and Communication theories.

As a business developer I’m a profound advocate of in-bound marketing concepts. I co-founded a London based branding bureau. I create content and build communities. I am a professional speaker, blogger, and workshop facilitator. And I’ve arranged and hosted numerous international conferences, unconferences and hackatons within IT and DevOps. And I’m still volunteering in the Danish core team of organizers of the Danish DevOpsDays chapter. We organize an annual, non-profit DevOps conference.

I have worked as a mentor, advisor and board member to several early startups. Both in the pre-seed phase and beyond. I have sold off a company of my own and I therefore also have hands-on experience of the internal workings of a company acquisition. I have been a member of the Danish Business Angels and I have attended their highly recommended course in startup investments. I’ve collaborated on various occasions with VCs and I invest in Nordic scaleups myself. I have a profound understanding and insight in the startup ecosystem.

My latest endeavour was as a group lead to a lean software development team of 10 developers. I built this team and developed this business from scratch over just 12 months. We build GxP grade software deliveries mainly to companies in the manufacturing industry.

The path I’ve followed has brought me to a position where I have a unique, and very broad understanding of both Business Development, Product Development, Software Development, the Startup ecosystem — but most importantly I believe in people and I find great pleasure in constantly exploring the right balance between leadership, didactics and coaching.

As a leader I work with a focus on transformational leadership with an offset in lean management principles and my education as a business coach. I aim to motivate, mentor and inspire people.

Over the years I’ve worked closely with universities throughout all of Scandinavia; Chalmers, NTNU, ITU, DIKU, DAIMI, Malmö Högskola, Copenhagen Business Academy and Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. I’m highly motivated by improving and contributing to the education of the next generation of developers. I’ve hosted more than 50 academic interns throughout my career. And I’ve worked as an adjunct professor, planning and teaching an international 30 ECTS point course in Digital Product Development.

I have a substantial network as a consequence of my long history as business developer in IT. Both as an employer and mentor of IT professionals, and as leader of several service delivery bureaus in IT.

That concludes my summary, in the following I’ll dive into even more details in chronological order first by education and then by workplace. But before that I’d like to point to some of the breadcrumbs and traces I’ve left on the internet - that it might make sense to explore, in the context of getting the full picture of who I am.

My handle is the same on all platforms. Find me as lakruzz on:

I don’t use X, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Substack etc much and I don’t even have accounts on TikTok or Snapchat. But I do use closed team forums like Slack and Discord quite extensively.

Writings

Speaks

I’ve done a ton of technical speaking, inspirational talks and key notes. Some of them are recorded and available, but in my own opinion these talks are meant to be encounters with people. Often the quality of the recordings lack quite a bit in professionalism and it takes away the entertainment. The criteria for sharing should be “entertaining”. I believe these ones are:

Interviews

Education

1997, M.Sc. in Computer Science and Communication theories

My field of study was Computer Science and Communication theories. I graduated from Roskilde University in Denmark.

The study combines software development, with communications, philosophy and anthropology. My master thesis was called “The Operational Designer”. It was an analysis of what actually makes (software) designers operational. The theoretical ballast was Cognitive Science, Participatory Design, JAD, Design Thinking, Epistemology, Positivism (The Scientific Method).

Recall that 1997 was back in pre-agile days, but Lean and Design Thinking were actually established terms and we studied Volvo’s Just-In-Time vision, situated learning through retrospectives, short feedback loops, close and participatory dialog with end-users, design patterns, version control, automation.

I’d say that I have stayed faithful to my theoretical ballast since then. I have continued to study and experiment in this field under the headline “Lean principles and epistemological approach to learning and leadership”.

2020, Master in Business Coaching

Over a period of 4 terms through 2018-2020 I completed a 120 ECTS master class in Business Coaching and Philosophical Leadership. At Copenhagen Coaching Center, accredited by European Mentoring and Coaching Council.

The education covers coaching techniques - both personal coaching and team coaching. The first two semesters are founded in psychological theories: Cognitive psychology, psychodynamic theory, systemic and narrative theories.

As part of the education I’m certified in Big Five Personality Traits tests.

3rd and 4th semester are founded in philosophy: Taking offset in Aristotle’s ancient Protrepticus, brought forward to modern age by philosophers such as Ole Fogh Kirkeby and Kim Gørtz. Using rhetoric to explore values.

The first two semesters are essentially an education in asking questions. While the latter two are about listening and exploring. All in a context as coach or leader.

I’ve completed all four semesters, but I haven’t handed in a master thesis yet - I may, or may not do that one day. My main reason for taking the education was to learn, not to get certified.

Work Experience

1997:2001 — Enator Software developer, version control specialist

Immediately after graduation I started as a consultant and software developer in a small Danish branch of a huge Swedish consulting bureau: Enator.

During my time there I started out as C++ developer, but quite soon I became responsible for Version Control, rolling out Rational ClearCase in Denmark’s - at the time - largest bank, and in addition I worked as QA manager (automated functional tests) in a financial real-time risk management system (same bank).

After a couple of years in the financial sector I was engaged by Ericsson in Denmark. I became the ClearCase Admin and Release and Version Control manager in Ericsson’s LISA project, developing call center solutions on Windows servers.

During my 4 years in Enator the company was first merged and later swallowed by an even larger Finnish consulting bureau: Tieto. When the acquisition was complete, the company was completely transformed, my interests in the emerging focus in our business; using software to support software development was not sustained in the new Tieto - and it was time for me to find a new turf

2001:2007 — KruseControl, Self-employed consultant

My career as self-employed consultant ignited from my acquired Rational ClearCase skills and extensive focus on optimizing the software developer’s workday through version control systems and build and release automation.

Ericsson in Lund, Sweden had heard the rumor that I was the ClearCase hero that could bring order to their processes.

I founded KruseControl Inc. and for five years I was responsible for expanding and maintaining the largest ClearCase version control installation in the world, hosted at Ericsson/Sony Ericsson in Lund, Sweden.

I started the assignment in 2001, at the time we were two admins, we had two ClearCase servers and about 100 users. A couple of years later, when SonyEricsson was carved out of Ericsson Mobile Communications I followed SonyEricsson. At that time we had 25 sites inside Ericsson EMC, we had 5000+ users and the community of Ericsson ClearCase admins counted more than 20 people around the world.

It was in this community of ClearCase admins inside Ericsson where I had my first real encounter with working remote. I was intrigued and fascinated by the everyday challenges of making the distributed team with colleagues in USA, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden, England, Scotland, Denmark work efficiently together. I organized internal conferences, joint backlogs, kanban style task management and I defined standards for sharing and releasing reusable code snippets.

In Sony Ericsson I build roughly the same setup as we had left in Ericsson. In 2006 I was single-handedly responsible for keeping the steam up on 25 - now virtual - servers with 3500+ users. The distributed team had become obsolete - it was literally just me and my Perl scripts (I’m really good at scripting - at that time, especially in Perl).

After almost 5 years commuting 100 km in each direction from my home in Denmark to Lund in Sweden I got tired of the commute, and one of the interns took over the responsibility of my pile of Perl scripts and I stopped at SonyEricsson.

During my time as self-employed in KruseControl I had several other customers - all related to Version Control Systems, automated builds, configuration as code: Novo Nordisk (Industry), Coloplast (Industry), ATP (insurance), PFA (insurance), Danfoss (industry), Grundfos (Industry) Tieto Finance U.K. (mortgage loan management).

For 8 years I essentially lived off my ClearCase expertise. During that time I gave speeches at Rational’s - later IBM’s - User Conferences in Denver and Orlando on several occasions (4 times in total). I collaborated with Rational - and later IBM - who used me as a ClearCase and ClearQuest certified trainer on their official classes.

2007:2019 — Praqma, Co-founder, Partner, CMO, CTO, Rainmaker, Chairman

I founded Praqma in 2007. The off-set was that I had built up far too many customer relations in KruseControl to handle them by myself. Praqma’s foundation back then was what we called “Application Management”. This was the term we used back-in-the-days for our modern age DevOps.

Up until 2015 Praqma was in entrepreneurial startup mode and besides managing the company I spent most of the time working as a consultant; Novo Nordisk, ATP, Atmel, Volvo, MAN Diesel & Turbo, Grundfos - and a lot of shorter gigs at countless other customers.

From 2015 Praqma started growing rapidly and from then and forward I attended more C-level duties - from 2015 to 2018 Praqma expanded from 8 to 50 employees. In those three years we expanded from 1 to 3 countries and our turnover grew from 1M€ to 7M€.

It felt like establishing the community of distributed colleagues that I had experienced inside Ericsson 10 years earlier. In 2018 we were close to 50 employees in Praqma - and we were an impressively diverse bunch; together we represented 18 different nationalities.

I dusted off my communications background from uni and started acting as CMO. The focus was on Inbound Marketing. A marketing approach which is also rooted in Lean principles: Develop customers first and products later - driven by uncovering true value.

We started building the community around our Continuous Delivery (CoDe) conferences and extensive Meetup program. In my role as acting CMO and Rainmaker I developed concepts such as free Open Source git extensions, blogs and a Continuous Delivery Maturity Model,

I have toured with the CoDe Maturity Model at more than 20 different occasions - and I have opened quite a handful of Praqma’s largest accounts, often with a full week of workshops based on the material in the model, which I’ve developed gradually over time.

I founded and led the development of the conference platform code-conf - that Praqma used for execution of more than 80+ meetups and 20+ conferences since the launch in summer 2016.

Through use of remote workers (I was in Copenhagen, they were in Russia and Aarhus) I designed and led the transition of all our websites to be built entirely on JAM stacks, using GitHub, Jekyll, JavaScripts, Circle CI, utilizing GitHub issues and a simple release train branching strategy to implement an entirely automated workflow. GitOps - essentially.

During my time in Praqma I developed several partnerships (on my plate was Docker, Jenkins, GitHub, IBM, Programming Research, XebiaLabs).

I established an exclusive alliance of Praqma customers - referred to as “The CoDe Alliance“ counting members such as Volvo, Grundfos, Danfoss, Siemens, Vestas, Atmel, MAN Diesel & Turbo, Yxlon, Kamstrup. The alliance was jointly exploring and sharing Continuous Delivery and DevOps concepts and sponsored joint Open Source projects - Everything from Gradle extensions, Jenkins Plugins, Git extensions, Atlassian extensions.

As part of our talent development program in Praqma, I have hosted more than 30 interns since the beginning in 2007 - typically in 3 month internships. We have released quite a handful of open source products on that account.

In 2016 we launched the first Continuous Delivery Academy - a 5 day free summer-school program for graduate students within IT. Teaching them Git, GitHub, Docker, Jenkins and agile task management. Since the first launch we have executed the academy in collaboration with universities in Copenhagen, Gothenburg, Oslo, Trondheim, Odense, Aarhus, Lund - we have been in contact with literally hundreds of graduate students and combined with our internships we have used it as a platform of recruitment of close to 20% of all the employments in Praqma.

As Praqma steadily grew to become a well established brand within DevOps and Continuous Delivery, quite naturally the focus shifted from explore towards exploit.

I’m an entrepreneur at heart - I find joy in building, creating, exploring. I lead by engagement and by example - When working in C-level roles I’m taking pride in acting as a coach and mentor.

Praqma found its firm ground in the consulting business and the everyday management evolved to be more and more operational - Forces inside Praqma were interested in engaging heavily with Atlassian and essentially becoming an Atlassian partner and Atlassian expert agency. We started steering away from the tool agnostic Open Source oriented focus and It wasn’t what I wanted. It was once again time for me to go and establish something new.

In early 2018 I started my master education in Business coaching and philosophical leadership, I took the role as Chairman of the Board in Praqma and left the rudder and the engine of Praqma to my co-founder partner in the role as CEO and the 3rd partner whom we onboarded in 2015, in the role as CTO.

As chairman I led the Merger and Acquisition process and In June 2019 Praqma was acquired by Eficode. The company then became Eficode Praqma. At the same time I ceased all engagement in Praqma, including my seat on the board.

Today it’s all just Eficode.

2016:2021 Phable, Co-founder, branding through storytelling

Alongside with Praqma I co-founded Phable - a London based design and branding bureau specialized in branding through storytelling. With a determined focus on tech and DevOps companies.

The company is managed and run by people with extensive experience as Art Directors, Graphic Designers, Professional word-smiths.

In Phable we established the DevOps Culture Magazine. Carefully designed to brand DevOps related companies towards people of the global community.

I occasionally acted as technical advisor to Phable and its customers, and I had a seat on the board.

During the spring of 2021 I sold off my 20% stock in Phable and left the board. I’m still a friendly advisor to the management in Phable. But other than that I’m not formally engaged in Phable anymore.

2018:2020 Prolike, Founder, Mentor to yipees

In April 2018 I founded Prolike - home of the Yipees - Short for Young Independent Professionals.

A handful of the core concepts that I had developed in Praqma had grown to become obsolete in the context of Praqma. As the brand recognition of Praqma grew and grew it became quite effortless for Praqma to employ the top shelf DevOps talent in the market, and the need for our talent development program had become less necessary.

However, the extensive program and my experience in hosting internships and mentoring young IT talents, leading by example and engagement was still dear to me - and too good to throw away.

So I founded Prolike. Prolike was a master/apprentice workplace for young IT talents. A place for youngsters who desire to work like pros - who desire to become pro-like.

Right from the start, Prolike was designed as a thin-shell company, a network-driven company, Engaging freelancers in collaboration and creating a distributed working community embracing the new gig-economy that’s rapidly emerging, especially within IT.

I never took out any salary in Prolike - to me it was more of a semi-philanthropic side-gig. It greatly satisfies my interest in coaching, mentoring and lean approach to software development, marketing and learning.

In Prolike we worked with full stack development, serverless technologies and Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms using contemporary technologies. We developed truly T-shaped competence profiles from both backend and frontend developers.

However - when the Corona pandemic hit us in May 2020 we shut down Prolike. The type of customers we served were mostly small businesses, and they all suffered hard from the lock-down of our society, so we lost all our customers almost overnight.

When Corona hit us we were 9 employees. I managed to out-place 5 of them, with the current customers, who agreed to employ or engage them directly. One found a job for himself and three went back to university to continue study. So Prolike landed safely and has now ceased all its activities.

2018:2023, Coaching professionals, leaders and managers

On the side of it all, mostly as a personal interest and to keep my acquired coaching skills sharp, I offer personal coaching sessions to professionals, mostly leaders and managers, helping them to uncover new potential in their careers or lighten up tense situations with new perspectives.

2019:2023 inc inc, lean business development and startup studio

It was never really my intention to work in Prolike myself. So I formed inc inc in parallel. Since I left Praqma I’ve been personally engaged in Lean business development, lean software development, technology advisor roles, product and project management (CTO for hire) and team building as self-employed in my own company.

I’ve been engaged first as advisor and later as chairman of the board at consulting bureau Kvalifik, who specializes in design, full stack development and pretotyping. And I worked as a management advisor to Verifa. A startup in Finland/Sweden specialized in DevOps activities.

From October 2020 - April 2021 I was engaged by Relocare as interim CTO. Relocare is a company who engaged a software partner to create an app (Social Security App), for automatic handling of A1 health insurance applications for business travelers in EU. Unfortunately the relationship between Relocare and the software provider got strained, deliveries were delayed, contracts breached, the financial runway came to an end and a conflict was emerging.

In my role as interim CTO I’ve led the process of bringing the development to a closure to everyone’s satisfaction, settle conflicts and place the app safely in production, ready to onboard 1000s of end-users.

From inc inc I have also conducted an online master class; “DevOps for Executives” for 25 Software and IT managers in Santander Consumer Bank (SCB), helping them to a common understanding of DevOps and lean software development principles, and advising them in setting a path forward, on their ambition to “a self-service infrastructure” - giving software developers access to production infrastructure through configuration as code and GitOps principles . On the back of the masterclass I’ve continued to facilitate internal workshops and advise managers on this topic in SCB.

In early 2022 I invited one of my former interns from Praqma into inc inc as an equal partner. It was a young T-shaped full stack developer, also with a consulting background and even experienced in Serverless SaaS startups. We transformed inc inc into a startup incubator and accelerator and we were sustaining various startups in forming their teams, finding their market fits and going to market. 2022 - 2023 Adjunct Professor at CPH School of Design and technology (KEA) In September 2022 I started a three terms contract as a full-time adjunct professor at Copenhagen School of Design and Technology. I was responsible for developing a full semester (30 ECTS) international elective program in SaaS/Digital product development - essentially an elective about Lean Startup methodologies, Pretotyping, no-code and low-code technologies and establishing market fit with as little effort as possible. The elective accepted students from all over the world.

In the spring term of 2023 I also lectured on the topics “Technology” and “Agile Software Development” at the AP degree level in computer science and PBA level in IT Architecture respectively. During the employment I also worked on establishing digital labs in the context of a collaborative community hosted from a dedicated public community website. An effort to build a Community of Practice to facilitate Peripheral Legitimate Participation from the students..

2023:2025 The Tech Collective, business developer and group lead

In November 2023 I joined The Tech Collective, a tech consultancy initiated and owned by Implement Management Consulting Group. I joined the hub “Test & DevOps” (t&do) which at the time when I joined really only had a test management profile. My task in t&do was to build a strong DevOps/DevX profile in the market and build a team of software developers, to initiate Implement’s and The Tech Collective’s professional software product deliveries.

I worked as part of the leader team in t&do and I have employed 10 developers who were all fully occupied with customer facing software product deliveries. We built GxP grade software for large industries. I was the people manager for the majority of the employees in the team and I worked with the team every day, committing code to production regularly.

We developed a process purely kanban based task and assignment management, paired programming, no-estimates, and with no pull-requests. In the process we used, all quality gates are 100% automated and the main branch is kept in an always shippable state with roughly 250 commits per week. Our release and deployment process was based solely on Semantic Version labels and automation of entirely individually releasable components based on deployment manifests. We measured on DORA metrics in real-time And we had even built and released a substantial portfolio of open source GitHub Extensions and Callable Workflows for anyone to adopt freely.