Born together. Not bolted on.
Connascent means born together, arising at the same time. Software engineers use a sharper form of the word: two parts of a system are connascent when a change to one forces a change to the other to keep everything correct. We took that seriously.
What connascence means in software
The idea comes from the software designer Meilir Page-Jones, who proposed it as a way to reason about how the parts of a program depend on each other. Rather than call a dependency simply good or bad, it asks how strong it is, how close the parts sit, and how many other parts it reaches.
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Strength
How hard the dependency is to change. A shared name is easy to fix. A shared assumption nobody wrote down is not.
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Locality
How close the connected parts are. A tight dependency inside one module is manageable. The same one across systems or teams is expensive.
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Degree
How many parts it touches. One link is a detail. A dependency running through everything is the structure.
A summary of the idea is on Wikipedia.
What it means for how we work
A website, the software behind it, where it is hosted and how it is secured change together. Treat them as separate jobs and the dependencies between them become the expensive kind: strong, far apart and unowned. So we keep them close.
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Built together
The site, the software and the hosting are designed as one piece of work, not assembled from parts nobody planned together.
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Tested together
Security is part of the build and checked against the whole system, not bolted on at the end.
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Looked after together
The people who built it are the people who keep it running, so what is learned in one place is applied everywhere.
Rukhshanda Zaman
Founder & CEO
Educational technology specialist with experience across independent schools, government schools and universities in Sydney.
Imran Shahid
Founder & CTO
Engineering leader based in Sydney, focused on secure-by-design architecture and the distributed platforms behind it. Experience across API-first systems on AWS, Python and Django, and DevOps and secure development.
Connascent Web Services has been building and looking after websites and software for Australian organisations since January 2018, from Sydney. We are two to three people, in-house, and we all work across the whole job. There is no account manager between you and the person writing the code: whoever quotes your work is whoever does it.
That size is why we would rather be specific about what is included than sell a package nobody reads, and why we do not publish a price list: we have not seen your project yet. Most people come to us needing something an off-the-shelf product will not do. We build it, host it on AWS in Sydney, and keep looking after it, with affordability paired with craft and never a substitute for it.
The letter C, encoded as data: a 3×3 grid of squares, structured by design. It only reads as a C because every square sits exactly where its neighbours expect it, and moving one breaks the letter. That is connascence in miniature, and it is why we leave the grid, its spacing and the Ember square exactly as they are.
If that is the sort of arrangement you want, talk to us and tell us what you are working on.