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I'm Andrew Baker, also known online as Andrew Ninja Baker, Group CIO at Capitec Bank. I write about engineering leadership, AWS architecture, database performance, and banking technology. The kind of problems you only understand after you've broken them at scale.
Design budget: three crayons and a strong opinion about kerning.
No recycled hot takes. Every post is written by someone who has shipped the thing, scaled it, and cleaned up the mess.
Why your best engineers leave, how bad org structures quietly destroy teams, and what separates engineering leaders who scale from those who stall.
Banking-grade AWS deployments, multi-cloud trade-offs, and database design at scale. The architectural decisions that prevent 3am incidents.
Network architecture, internet infrastructure, and the foundational technology decisions that determine whether your systems hold up under real-world load.
Open source software that powers real production systems, and the macOS tooling that keeps high-output engineering teams productive.
Fraud systems, banking malware, attack surfaces, and what building secure financial technology looks like inside one of Africa's largest retail banks.
AI in banking, LLMs in production, AI search optimisation, and what actually changes when you deploy AI onto real infrastructure at scale.
I'm the Group CIO at Capitec Bank, one of South Africa's largest retail banks. Before that I ran technology at ABSA Group, built algorithmic trading systems at Barclays Capital, and spent time at AWS.
At Barclays Capital in London I spent nearly a decade as Head of EMEA Algorithmic Trading IT, where I architected and owned BARX, Barclays' acclaimed platform for algorithmic trading and market making across multiple asset classes, operating high frequency trading engines in global markets at microsecond latency and tens of thousands of messages every millisecond. As CTO for Barclays Africa and Absa Group I subsequently led corporate and investment banking technology across the continent, navigating the regulatory, compliance and core banking complexity of running a bank in many countries at once.
This blog is where I write what I actually think. Opinionated, technical, and occasionally uncomfortable for people who prefer consensus over correctness.
340+ posts on engineering leadership, AWS, databases, and banking technology, written by someone who's shipped at scale.
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