Author: Andrew Baker
The Message Mangler: Why Leaders Make Decisions on Fiction
There’s a silent killer sitting in most large organisations. It doesn’t appear on any risk register, it doesn’t show up in your sprint velocity charts, and it certainly won’t announce itself in your next all-hands. It operates quietly, in the gap between what actually happened and what gets reported upward. Meet the Message Mangler. 1. […]
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AI Coding Gap: Dark Factories and Why Your AI Strategy Is Failing in 2026
What the gap between frontier AI teams and everyone else actually means for developers, managers, and organisations in 2026 1. The Paradox Nobody Is Talking About Honestly Ninety percent of Claude Code’s codebase was written by Claude Code itself. Boris Churny, the engineer who leads the Claude Code project at Anthropic, has not personally written […]
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MCP in 2026: Rise, Security Flaws & What Comes Next
A plain language guide for AI practitioners navigating a rapidly shifting landscape 1. Introduction In November 2024, Anthropic quietly released an open source specification called the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Within twelve months it had become one of the most talked about technologies in the AI industry. By early 2026 it was simultaneously celebrated as […]
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Federation vs Centralisation: Stop Burying Tech Talent
There’s a question that quietly shapes the fate of technology talent in almost every organisation, and most businesses never ask it directly. Instead, they stumble into an answer through a series of incremental org design decisions, budget cycles, and leadership preferences. The question is this: is technology a support function to the business, or is […]
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Reverse Engineer AWS to Terraform: CloudToRepo Guide
If you have ever inherited an AWS estate, you know the feeling before you can even describe it. Hundreds of resources spread across regions you did not know were enabled. Lambdas with no source repos. Config rules that predate the current team. IAM roles that look like they were generated by a sleep-deprived octopus at […]
Read more →SQL Server & PostgreSQL Database Health Check Guide
Every production database accumulates the same class of problems over time. Indexes fragment as rows are inserted and deleted unevenly. Dead tuples pile up faster than background processes can reclaim them. Queries that once ran against a small table now scan tens of millions of rows because nobody added an index when the table grew. […]
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Banking Malware on Android: How to Spot It and Stay Safe
Published by Andrew Baker and the Capitec App Security Team | March 2026 For media enquiries and quotable statistics from this article, see the Press Summary at the end. Every day, approximately 15 million South Africans open the Capitec app to check their balance, pay a bill, or send money to a loved one. It […]
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Why Tech Empires Fall: Arrogance, Control & Collapse
1. Arrogance Is the Drawbridge Every great empire in history has been brought low by a version of the same mistake. The fortress is so strong, the moat so wide, and the walls so high, that the people inside begin to believe they have transcended the rules. They stop serving the people beyond the walls. […]
Read more →Java 26: 10 JEPs Explained for Developers
Java 26 landed on 17 March 2026, right on schedule as Oracle’s relentless six month cadence demands. As the first non-LTS release since Java 25, it ships ten JDK Enhancement Proposals, or JEPs. A JEP is the formal unit of change in the Java platform: a numbered design document authored by engineers from Oracle, the […]
Read more →Aurora PostgreSQL Write Throughput: Saturation & Tuning Guide
1. Introduction Every engineering team that runs a high throughput transactional workload on Amazon Aurora PostgreSQL will eventually arrive at the same uncomfortable question: why does the database start refusing to go faster, and what can actually be done about it? Aurora’s architecture is genuinely brilliant, but it introduces a set of write path constraints […]
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