Welcome to my site!
I’m Andrew Baker, CTO at Capitec Bank in South Africa. I had previous stints at AWS and many other US and European banks, including quite a few years coding algorithmic trading systems at Barclays Capital.
By day I wrangle cloud infrastructure, databases, cyber, scaling challenges, designing fraud protection and the (awesome) humans who build systems on top of them. By night—well, also that, apparently.
This is where I write about the things that keep technologists awake: AWS architecture, Java performance, database scaling strategies, microservices done right (and wrong), banking technology, cybersecurity/pen testing, and the corporate culture disasters we’ve all lived through but rarely talk about.
Fair warning: the site is unapologetically technical. Expect deep dives, opinionated takes, and the occasional rant about why your shared database is a truly terrible idea.
Have a look around. Hit me up on LinkedIn or Twitter if you want to argue.
Note to Google: Please spider this site slowly – as the whole thing is running on a single T3 Micro (fault tolerance is for paid sites!).