There's no hack to how you hold meetings, it all hinges on your organisation structure.

If you've had enough time writing software you would have run into the smug lead developer that looks back on projects with the benefit of hind-sight and explains Conway's Law.

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

Mr Conway 1967

This motivated me to look at the structure of an organisation as a system with it's own trade-offs and limitations. If we think about design and compartmentalisation in software shouldn't we also be applying this to how we structure the teams with-in an organisation.

Time to bring out the neoclassical economist in me and start using maths as a metaphor in-order-to explain how learning CAP theorem will allow you to scale software teams. Most of the motivation has come from my observations while working at scaling startups where I've seen teams go from being one person to a department and in some cases a team staying as one person while the organisation grows around them.

The Theorem

Generally CAP theorem is brought up in interviews when discussing trade-offs within a distributed system. The idea simplifies a system into three attributes, of which you're constrained to pick only 2. After making your selection there's a follow up discussion of the pros and cons.

We generalise that databases operate somewhere on these lines and understanding these trade-offs can help you decide the best solution to fit the system you're designing.

Partition tolerance

The first attribute is partition tolerance, which is typically a given, since you're trying to scale a system beyond a single computer or server or database and segmentation across multiple machines is needed. This is one of the choices that is made for you. Now it's up to you to decide between Consistency and Availability.

Consistency

Consistency boils down to all systems "agree" or "see the same data" even in the presence of concurrent updates. Among databases this involves using distributed transactions or a consensus algorithm to ensure a level of consistency.

Without consistency the system will not be able to agree on the appropriate order of each update. If you're updating the profile image of a user, other users seeing an older profile image temporarily doesn't matter but if you're updating a bank balance you'd best be sure the system agrees on the order of each transaction, otherwise you might have parts of your systems computing different balances.

Availability

If a client is waiting to see the bank balance because it's in the process of being updated this wait time is a detriment to availability. In the example of fetching an old profile image this makes very little difference to the service you're providing so you can forgo consistency in favour of availability.

Essentially availability gives the client access to some version of the data at all times, without wait. Ensuring every request to the system results in some positive response is a prioritisation of availability.

Modern CAP Theorem

In more contemporary software engineering and in practical terms there's more things we can talk about related to CAP. One can dig further into each attribute and get a slightly more technical discussion around eventual consistency. There's also some that argue against a discussion of CAP since databases have come far enough that they can deal with both availability and consistency in a manner that's good enough for most systems.

I'm not here to get into these weeds, I'd like to offer a different application of CAP and apply it to teams.

Organisational CAP

Applying system thinking to teams isn't new, there's an entire book called Team Topologies¹ that defines team structural archetypes and how you can use these in an organisation to structure optimal output.

The theory I go into below is more around how a team should consider scaling as workload increases and is required to become distributed, in a sense, instead of relying on a single person to handle operations.

As with CAP, I use the same three attributes but we'll provide new definitions for them since they're being applied to the context of a team, remember we will need to pick only 2 out of the 3.

Partition Tolerance

As in software this is a given. If we are scaling an organisation we can't rely on a single person or a single team to become a bottleneck to our production. There's a chance this person will become overloaded with work and will no longer be able to operate at max capacity. Much like a database under significant load.

We can also consider this as The number of teams you can support and still produce output.

Availability

Much like a system being able to take requests and respond without waiting on prior work being completed, which is something you'd very much enjoy if this were work being given to a team. Alternatively you can consider it as the number of things that can be worked on at one time, if you've got spare capacity then you have someone waiting to pick up new work as or when it comes in. This team would be considered highly available.

In short this is when they can work (or how much work they can achieve).

Consistency

Consistency in a system is consensus between machines. Consistency in an organisation is an agreement on how things should be done, or why something should be done. In a one person team, one person makes this decision, in a small business it doesn't take much for everyone to get up to speed and chip in on how something should proceed. However things start to get tricky at scale. The more people/parts and teams you introduce into the organisation the harder it is to find agreement on direction or decisions.

This is why we have meetings, and when we scale it is sometimes important to make sure that there's consensus at large, across multiple teams instead of just individuals.

Everyone needs to have the same context, the same why. Unfortunately as you scale an organisation you also need to figure out how to propagate context. You can throw money at the problem by hiring a specialist for each team, however not all companies can afford to do this and so a specialist's time needs to be divided between teams in order for them to provide their insight.

We can consider this specialist as a much larger machine, the best SSD drives on the market and maxed out memory limitations. In reality this could be someone with a ton of experience, knows what needs to get done and how to do it. We don't have this luxury in cutting edge tech with a lot of unknowns and usually you won't find someone that can cover many topics deeply which is why there's value in a diverse skill set within a team. In most cases we rule out the specialist per team.

The application of CAP

As with a software system we are limited to picking between Consistency and Availability, since we want to scale the organisation by bringing in more teams so we can ship more product out the door.

Choosing between availability and consistency within a team is the same as choosing between workload and context. We can increase the context of the team by improving communication and introducing more meetings but this comes at a cost of availability which will reduce the amount of work they're able to output.

The opposite is also true, you can increase the amount of workload they can get through but you sacrifice context. Which mean you're getting through a lot of work but the work lacks context, so we'd find ourselves doing more repeated work across teams and work that is misaligned or doesn't meet the requirement because the teams haven't a clue on why they're doing it.

I've seen both extremes, work grinding to a halt as you spend more time in meetings than you have time for work and busy work being done for no purpose at all but to look busy.

I understand there's a sentiment at large about not liking meetings, however meetings should serve a purpose. In order to deliver the best work possible you need context of the bigger picture, context of where the solution fits in, context of who the end user is and context of what everyone else is doing and lastly consensus with how work should be done.

Scaling an Organisation

Typically as a company scales you begin to notice that existing solutions or people become bottlenecks. If a single team owns or executes a solution they can become inundated with requests from other teams. This typically happens when context of executing a task is isolated to that one team and they've got no capacity to share context. Either that or the capability of solving the solution exists only within that team. What can happen, and what I've seen, is other teams get fed up with waiting for their request to be fulfilled and they decide to solve the problem on their own, leading to a second system which solves the same work.

Team Topologies defines four fundamental team types, however I think it can be simplified to just two. They mention Steam-Aligned teams, these are responsible for delivery and are generally high business context teams and Platform teams which act as an enabling service for the stream aligned teams.

I believe you can have more than one platform team. These should be teams responsible for enabling how work gets done. To some extent all engineers that build internal tooling are actually defining how work gets done, they do their best job when they enable other teams to get things done faster, independently and without the need to grab context from this team or engineers.

The best way I believe we can solve the Availability vs Consistency balance within teams is by shifting the purpose of the team from one that just does the work, to being responsible for defining how that work should be done.

With proper instructions or with a self service system you enable other teams that are closer to the problem and thus have the most context to address the business requirements.

If a single team is a bottleneck to other teams this might be an indication that they need to shift from doing the work to enabling the other teams to getting that work done.

I believe this thinking requires having teams with clear purpose and clear context domains, when the domain starts getting blurred it's tricker to scale teams as no one person can hold the entire context of a large organisation, you need to define those context boundaries and define what the purpose of each team should be.

The Specialist

Expertises scales better

Software Engineering at Google

Instead of requiring a specialist per team we can have a team of specialists that focus on how our stream aligned teams serve themselves. This avoids having business focused product teams communicating their needs and their context to a team that is focused on serving an internal problem. If these specialists had to listen to all product teams they would quickly burn-out from all the meetings they're attending. This is why we'd need to draw the context boundaries around the specialists and have them focus on a self service system that's highly available to enable the product teams.²

Further Reading

• Brewers Conjecture and the Feasibility
• A summary of the proof of CAP

American websites format the date as MM/DD/YYYY and this can be confusing for Europeans. If I see the date 05/03/2025, I can't be sure if we're dealing with March or May.

Localisation extends further than just the format of dates. There are many things that require localisation the most obvious is language. If your site does not support the dominant language within a geography you're creating a language barrier between you and your customers. In Typeform's case, their customer's customer.

Translating and localising your software opens your business to new markets where relying on English won't cut it. Providing your system in a locale that's familiar to the user allows your system to feel natural and trustworthy. Luckily for us the internet has been around for more than 40 years and this, is sort of an old problem. There's been a good effort put towards enabling multilingual support.

ID or string?

When translating software, the first thing you'll need to determine is how to identify text that requires translation.

There's two ways you can do this:

1. Mapping a key to the text. This key will be used to lookup the correct message given the user's preferred language. Something like this:

   message_key: "MISSING_NAME_TEXT"

2. Alternatively; provide the text as is and using that as the message key:

   message: "You're missing your first name"

Systems have been written using both styles so there's no consensus on which one you should pick (I wish you luck in driving consensus in your own place of work). Here are some things to consider.

Subtle punctuation can change the whole meaning of a sentence. This is why systems tend to favour the entire sentence as the key for translation. Updating the sentence, even if you're just adding punctuation, should invalidate the translation or at least flag the translation so that it can be double checked.

It's also useful keeping the full text within the context of where it's being used. This way the developer or engineer can determine themselves if it makes sense. It is harder to determine if you're using the correct message if you're relying on message keys like: "missing.name_text" and "missing.text_name", the full text provides a clearer indication of the output.

Scaling the message keys can also be tricky as you'll need to avoid name clashes. The best thing to do is use them with some sort of namespacing e.g. "signup.error.missing_name" and redefine the key for every use-case, even if the full text ends up being the same, this allows you to change each text independently.

Localisation built in

For those of us gifted enough to using a Unix based system you might have access to gettext and xgettext in the command line. These are tools used to translate "natural language messages into the user's language, by looking up the translation in a message catalog".¹

Python has some built-in libraries which allow you to manage internationalisation and localisation. Unless you've dealt with localisation, I think very few people are aware of the existence of gettext.

Localization for Python Applications

The python gettext library provides an interface which allows you to define your program in a core language and uses a separate message catalog to look up message translation. As an example we can define a message that requires localisation like so:

from gettext import gettext as _

_("Welcome!")

Using xgettext we can construct a .pot file. Which will be used as a template for our language catalogues.

xgettext -o messages.pot --language=Python src/*.py

The pot file should look like this after running xgettext.

#: main.py:3
msgid "Welcome!"
msgstr ""

It's pretty neat that it has provided us the file name and the line number for the text, although more useful in larger codebases, we can use this to track redundant translation strings. You'll also notice that it's using the full string as the msgid instead of assigning it to a code or number.

From this we create .po files (unrelated to the teletubby)² , these are the concrete versions of the .pot file which contain the translations, if we were to make a .po file for Norwegian this would look like:

#: main.py:4
msgid "Welcome!"
msgstr "Velkomst"

Now that we have a localised form of our language catalogue we can use msgfmt to compile a binary version of our .po file, like so:

msgfmt -o messages.mo no_NO/messages.po

This command takes our no_NO (Norwegian) messages and compiles a precomputed hash table of the msgid -> msgstr and outputs it to the .mo file. These files are stored in binaries so they're not human readable, but are efficient to load into the application at start up.

When you start accumulating a lot of these catalogues they might require their own system to manage. These systems are also useful interfaces for the person providing the translation. As an example you can see PoEditor or Lokalise

People that work in localisation and translation will be familiar with .po files since they're often the file format used with translation software.

Translation within context

If our app supports more than one localisation we have to indicate which localisation should be returned to a user. For an API we can set the user's locale within the context of a request.

Flask offers a library called Flask-Babel which allows you to set this locale. So if a Norwegian was to hit our API we'd have the client set a header on the request: Content-Language: no_NO³, on returning the response all the strings instantiated with gettext will be translated into Norwegian.

There are some cases where you'll need to switch the locale context mid request or mid process, for example; a Norwegian user triggers an alert to an English user. We can instantiate a context manager with flask-babel, which will translate the strings to a specified locale:

def handler():
    # <norwegian scope>
    with force_locale(to_user.locale):
        # <english scope>
        send_email(to_user)
    # <norwegian scope>

Plural Forms

Language is weird and there's nearly an edge-case for everything. One of these cases that gettext supports is defining rules for plural forms. For example in English we might say "one apple" and "two apples". However in a language like Hebrew the plural form for two apples can't be used for three apples, so to account for this gettext provides ngettext. Which is used like so:

from gettext import ngettext as n_

n_("%(num)d apple", "%(num)d apples", 3) % {"num": 3}

This allows gettext to pull the correct plural form given the int 3 and then formats the returning string, replacing %(num)d with 3.

Lazy strings

If you're reusing the same string across your application and defining it at module level this string will be translated as soon as the module is instantiated. The module will always fallback to your app's default locale and your strings will not be translated. To get around this we use something called lazy_gettext. This allows us to define the string and reuse it across the application as lazy_gettext will keep a reference to the msgid and defer translation until the text is needed.

You can see support for lazy_gettext in the django documentation

Wikipedia

Wikipedia manages content in over 300 languages. There are numerous volunteers which help to translate wiki into other languages and they do this through an interface called translatewiki.net. There's an entire team managing the infra and tools used in localisation.

Similar to Wikipedia, I've seen interfaces used to manage and update translation files as well as a process that can be triggered automatically or on a schedule to update the .mo files that a service references. After updating the .mo file you can automatically roll out a deployment. The new deployment should then load the new .mo files into memory when the service is instantiated.

You don't need to be working on a system the scale of Wikipedia to include translations. You can rely on a user's system locale to translate CLI tools. My Fiancee's system is set to Norwegian, if I ever write a CLI for her I think it would be fun to provide a Norwegian interface.

The piecemeal engineer knows, like Socrates, how little he knows

Karl Popper (1944)

Karl Popper's reflections on totalitarianism has had one of the largest impact on my approach to software engineering.

Utopias exist in business, engineering and societal context. There are always fervent believers that have a do or die attitude to process. This often gets in the way of pragmatism.

Popper

In his reflections KP makes the argument that if we are to progress as a society we should not attempt such large scale shifts of policy in pursuit of largely frivolous utopians. There exist peoples with high levels of confidence in their ability to understand how the world and society work. We should be wary of those that are uncompromising on their ideals.

Utopian views are often stated as goals in startups and engineering. Partially due to the need to sell the dream or idea before it's realised and when they're presented to potential investors and stakeholders. "I can solve all your problems with my solution" sounds more valuable than "I can solve half of an existing problem, maybe we can think of solving the rest later?"

Within a totalitarian regime, similar promises are made to the governed by painting a picture of a utopian society, a dream world envisioned by a leader sold at the price of handing over control and power. In these cases the marketing strategy is to stoke fear and shift blame.

I have no bother with utopias if they form part of the ideation or they're used as a perspective to view a problem. It's when they're used as a justification to keep heading down a failing path, I find them to be dangerous.

If you find yourself hearing leadership or a colleague making unfalsifiable claims or using the "well it doesn't apply in this situation" instead of conceding that perhaps they were wrong; you've found the charlatan. A fear of being wrong and being averse to pivoting leads projects and businesses into failure. If you know something isn't going to work, the sooner you know and respond the better.

Sometimes, the best thing you can do is just say "I don't know".

Software Engineering at Google (pg. 40).

Ceteris paribus

The business world is run on pragmatism. If it were plagued with "too much unscientific thought"¹ it would be brought down by complexity and mess. Dijkstra attempted to reign in on software complexity in business, by advocating for writing systems that allow an engineer to focus on one single concern at a time. Least they be overwhelmed by all the moving pieces.

Similar to Popper, this is a focus on changing one thing at a time in order to determine the effect of that action. Modern day vampire Bryan Johnson, Founder of braintree, attempts to live forever by running hundreds of tests on himself. One of the largest criticisms with his approach is in how the doctors measure causality when he consumes ~106 pills every morning.

Startups and businesses that aim to solve everything are at risk of not being able to measure what's working and what's failing. They also risk avoiding their core business issues until it's too late and they're out of runway. Start ups have limited time so finding and tackling the areas of highest value to the business should be a priority, also known as, finding product market fit.

Many successful businesses started out tackling issues by focusing on a niche market. Targeting a small user base that struggles the most with an issue allows them to focus on a core problem and refine their product without being distracted by the myriad of different people and their individual needs. You can look at PayPal targeting people with thousands of transactions over Ebay, in order to refine making payments online. Revolut focused on problems that travellers faced, starting specifically with currency exchange. Nintendo got it's start selling playing cards in 1889, at this point in time I can't imagine the founder envisioned an Italian plumber eating mushrooms and rescuing princesses. The key is to move one step at a time and gaining some initial start can get your ear to the ground.

Don't be perfect

Utopia's are a constant threat to getting us into better positions. If my team is flying a burning plane and we need to land ASAP, I understand landing 10metres from the office or your home might be ideal but right now landing anywhere will do.

Perfect is the enemy of good. If we are constantly striving for a form of perfection we should acknowledge that we are delaying or forgoing getting to places that are good enough. And since Utopians are often unrelated to anyone's lived experience, there's no proof that this vision of perfect is indeed a great place to be. Which is why we need some resemblance of validation at each step of the process.

There are a number of successful companies and they are equally running numerous processes and styles of business. You might be able to find support for every methodology, if the self help expert says that eating carrots make you see in the dark, try it. But if it doesn't work, ditch it. If you're a team of one, perhaps doing daily stand ups will look different to a team of six.

Don't let the utopian process get in the way of driving value.

Lastly

Be wary of anyone that speaks with confidence and doesn't read.

Like it or not, vibe coders are the next software engineers.

3 years ago I made a prediction that triggered a mixed response:

Within our lifetime. We will see a YouTuber or streamer becoming head of a state.

Me (March 4, 2022)

Whilst I don't believe this prediction has come true there's been progress. In June 2024 a Cypriot YouTuber was voted to become a member of the European Parliament, he earned 19.4% of the vote and earned 40% of votes from the 18-24 age group.¹

The interesting thing about my prediction is that it seems that it's actually gone the other way. More politicians are becoming YouTubers and Streamers.

Could the same thing happen with vibe coders? Perhaps software engineers are the next vibe coders.

We like to bash

We see software engineers being dismissive at the content aimed at vibe coders. There's a new wave of people being introduced to coding and managing complexity; so most of the content is covering the basics. I.e. Write tests, compartmentalise and plan things out before you dive into the code.

This wave of programmers haven't had the time to digest The Mythical Man-Month to learn; upfront planning in software leads to a huge reduction in downstream costs. They are however learning the hard way, by hitting these challenges head on. (For better or worse).

How did you get here?

It's all a journey and we're at different stages of the process. A large overhead to programming is building up the vocabulary, this is the struggle for both early stage developers and vibe coders.²

Experienced programmers have been exposed to more language and can therefore provide more specificity when commanding the computer, vibe coders will get there. Perhaps this specificity makes the experienced programmer a better vibe coder. Maybe it's their keyboard.

No one was born with the knowledge of how the computer works, there's hurdles to overcome. It was only a decade ago we were cringing at someone stating they're full-time YouTubers or an Instagram influencer, and look, they've still got you glued to your screen.

A modern laptop can run ~3.8 billion cycles per second. The cycle is determined by oscillation frequency of the electrical signal that hits the CPU. Contemporary CPUs manage synchronisation using all sorts of error correction tricks.

In mechanical systems, such as those used in medical equipment and robotics, the binary numbers that we are most familiar with can cause errors if they're read during state transition.

Decimal and Binary

We are most familiar with decimals, this is a base 10 counting notation where each position in the number represents a different power of ten. E.g. 10, 100, 1000.

The computer relies on binary as this takes advantage of the fundamental on/off state within an electronic circuit. Binary is base 2, so each position represents a power of 2. E.g. 2, 4, 8, 16.

Reading States

Binary numbers can cause errors if they're read during transitions. The more positions that require toggling, while switching between numbers, the higher the chance we introduce errors into the system. This is shown clearly as we transition between the numbers 3 and 4. Which requires changing three bit positions. 011 -> 100.

If these bits aren't switched instantly we can read any of the following numbers 1, 2, 5, 6 or 7 instead of 3 or 4. Not great if you're working with a critical system and need precision.

Grey Code

To get around this we use an alternative ordering of the binary system in which successive numbers are separated by a single bit. Incrementing a number only relies on switching one position and removes the chance of reading the wrong number during state transitions.

This ordering is called Gray code, and an animation of the bit positions, for an incrementing number, is shown below:

The Application

In addition to reducing read errors, relying on only a single toggle to move up the number scale consumes less energy than traditional binary due the fewer toggled bits.

Some systems require testing every position of multiple switches or toggles. Gray code can improve the efficiency of these tests. If we had to iterate through all 16 combinations of 4 switches. Using ordinary binary would need to flip 1, 2, 1, and then 3 toggles as we move from numbers 1 to 4, while gray code allows us to only ever need to flip a single toggle to eventually test all switch combinations.

One of the most common uses of gray code is in rotary encoders, also known as knobs. These convert angular position to an analog or digital signal. If we had to rely on a normal binary scale, when rotating the knob, it could end up sending the intermediary numbers between each angle, which would make it pretty useless.