CTO · Leading People and Organizations · Applied AI

Building teams that deliver AI
in production, audit and all.

Christian Riesen — thirty years in software, twenty of them leading the people who build it. A platform scaled to a billion hits a day, the base infrastructure of the Swiss e-ID, and today applied AI inside Swiss healthcare, government, education and finance.

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team built, zero attrition

50+

hires from 300+ interviews

CHF 10M

public programme owned

34M

open-source downloads

Selected posts

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Featured Nov 2025 12 min read

Spec-driven agentic development in practice

The one trick almost nobody uses: tell the LLM to ask you the questions. A working method for turning a braindump into a spec precise enough that an agent can build from it — and keeping the spec as the source of truth afterwards.

Writing Oct 2016 8 min read

How to NaNoWriMo

The system that carried me through NaNoWriMo wins: plain text files, automatic backups, no backspace key, and a merciless focus on reaching the end of the story.

Engineering Jun 2012 2 min read

One Time Passwords in PHP and Google Authenticator

Two-factor auth for your own app with Google Authenticator: how the one-time-password RFCs work, and the PHP library I published to handle the tricky bits.