Opinionated Posts about Technology and Corporate Culture from Capitec’s Group CIO
I’m Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec Bank in South Africa. Before this I spent years building algorithmic trading systems at Barclays Capital, ran technology at ABSA Group, and did a stint at AWS — which means I’ve broken things at scale on three continents.
By day I wrangle cloud infrastructure, databases, cybersecurity, fraud protection systems, and the humans who build on top of them. Nights and weekends too, apparently.
This is where I write about the things that keep technologists awake: AWS architecture, Java performance, database scaling, microservices done right and wrong, banking technology, and the corporate culture disasters we’ve all survived but rarely discuss openly.
Fair warning: this site is unapologetically technical. Expect deep dives, opinionated takes, and strong opinions on why your shared database is a genuinely 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 gently — it runs on a single T4g.micro. Fault tolerance is for paid sites.