About

I'm Thor Henning Hetland -- most people call me Totto.

I've been building software professionally for over 30 years, starting with my Master in Software Development at NTNU (1996). Over those decades I've worked as a CTO, architect, lead developer, technology strategist, and trainer across international and domestic projects. I've shipped code in more programming languages than I care to count.

But the thing I keep coming back to is this: how do we build software better?

What I'm doing now

I founded eXOReaction to answer that question with today's tools. We're an AI-augmented software development consultancy based in Oslo, focused on helping teams work effectively with AI -- not as a gimmick, but as a genuine shift in how software gets built.

The core of our approach is Skill-Driven Development (SDD) -- a methodology I created for structured human-AI collaboration. SDD treats AI skills as composable, versioned building blocks that compound over time. It's been validated across four sectors (manufacturing, finance, renewable energy, AI security) with measured productivity gains of 25--66x compared to traditional approaches.

I also built Synthesis, a local-first knowledge infrastructure tool. It indexes thousands of files per second, provides sub-second search across entire codebases, and tracks cross-repository dependencies -- all without touching the cloud. It grew out of a real need: when SDD lets you generate 197,000 lines of code in 11 days, you need serious tooling to keep track of what you built.

I'm also co-founder and CTO of Quadim, a competence management SaaS platform. Quadim helps teams and organisations manage skill profiles, identify gaps, and build learning paths -- with AI integration throughout, including an intelligent agent (Frøya) that builds domain-specific competence libraries.

Community

Community has always been central to what I do. I co-founded JavaZone in 2001 -- it's now Scandinavia's largest developer conference. I served as president of javaBin (the Norwegian Java User Group) for a decade. I was appointed Sun Java Champion in 2005, the first in Scandinavia.

I was a founding board member and former chair of IASA Norway (later rebranded OSWA -- Oslo Software Architecture), where we grew the Norwegian software architecture community from a handful of people to over 3,500 members.

I've spoken at JavaZone, JavaOne, CommunityOne, NDC, Devoxx, and many others. I believe conferences and communities are where the real knowledge transfer happens -- not in vendor whitepapers.

At a glance

Founder & Technical Lead eXOReaction AS

Creator Skill-Driven Development (SDD)

Builder Synthesis

Co-founder JavaZone conference

Co-founder & CTO Quadim AS

Former chair IASA Norway / OSWA

Java Champion Since 2005 (first in Scandinavia)

Education MSc Software Development, NTNU (1996)

Based in Oslo, Norway

Contact

The best way to reach me is LinkedIn or email at totto@totto.org.