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I'm Andrew 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.
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, why promoting top managers rarely produces great leaders, and how structures quietly destroy teams.
Real-world patterns from banking-grade AWS deployments. Trade-offs and the decisions that keep you out of 3am incidents.
Scaling Aurora PostgreSQL, why your shared database is a liability, and what happens when write throughput hits the ceiling.
Fraud systems, banking malware, fintech architecture, and what building inside a regulated bank looks like from the inside.
Attack surfaces, banking malware, backdoors, quantum threats, and what real cybersecurity looks like inside a regulated financial institution.
AI in banking, LLMs in production, AI search optimisation, and what actually changes when you bolt 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.
This blog is where I write what I actually think. Opinionated, technical, and occasionally uncomfortable for people who prefer consensus over correctness.
201+ posts on engineering leadership, AWS, databases, and banking technology — written by someone who's shipped at scale.
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