Half Pizza Team

A blog series about building production software with tiny teams and simple tools.

Bezos said a team should be small enough to feed with two pizzas. That was a different era. AI coding assistants have changed what one or two engineers can get done in a day. The workload that used to justify a five-person team can now be handled by fewer people with the right tools.

When your team shrinks, your tools should shrink with it. But most people reach for Kubernetes, service meshes, and elaborate CI/CD platforms — enterprise tools carrying complexity budgets built for fifty-person teams. That complexity doesn't vanish when your team is two people. It just lands on fewer shoulders.

If a tool requires a dedicated team to operate, it's the wrong tool for a half pizza team.

This series walks through real production configs, real bugs, and real debugging sessions — all from the perspective of a one-person operation running multiple services across multiple languages. No hand-waving, no sanitized examples.