Author: Andrew Baker
WordPress Site Crashed After Plugin Update: Fix It Fast
You updated a plugin five minutes ago. Maybe it was a security patch. Maybe you were trying a new caching layer. You clicked “Update Now,” saw the progress bar fill, got the green tick, and moved on with your day. Now the site is down. Not partially down. Not slow. Gone. A blank white page. […]
Read more →Why Core Banking Was a Bad Idea From the Start
A companion piece to Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was. It is 1972. A group of very serious men in very wide ties are gathered in a very beige conference room. They are about to make decisions that will haunt your change advisory board fifty years from now. The following is a […]
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AWS IOPS Mismatch: Fix the Hidden Double Ceiling Bug
Andrew Baker, Chief Information Officer at Capitec Bank There is a class of AWS architecture mistake that is genuinely difficult to see. It does not appear in your cost explorer as an obvious line item. It does not trigger a CloudWatch alarm. It does not show up in a well architected review unless the reviewer […]
Read more →How to Find Who Mentions You Online Using Google
If you publish online, you should periodically search for yourself, not out of ego but out of discipline. The internet is an echo system, and if you do not measure where your ideas travel, you are operating blind. You want to know who is linking to you, who is quoting you, who is criticising you, […]
Read more →Force Claude to Debug Like an Engineer: 9-Step Guide
If you are doing 20 builds before finding the real issue, the problem isnot intelligence. It is workflow design. Claude defaults to probabilistic reasoning. It produces the most likelyexplanation. That is useful for writing. It is disastrous for debugging. You must force it into instrumentation mode. This article shows exactly what to configure, where to […]
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Run Bash MCP in Claude Desktop: 1-Script Setup Guide
Andrew Baker | 01 Mar 2026 | andrewbaker.ninja You want one script that does everything. No digging around in settings. No manually editing JSON. No clicking Developer, Edit Config. Just run it once and Claude Desktop can execute bash commands through an MCP server. This guide gives you exactly that. 1. Why You Would Want […]
Read more →How to Set Up MCP Filesystem Access in Claude Desktop
If you use Claude Desktop to edit code, write patches, or build plugin files, you have probably hit the same wall I did: Claude runs in a sandboxed Linux container. It cannot read or write files on your Mac. Every session resets. There is no shared folder. You end up copy pasting sed commands or […]
Read more →How to Publish Code on GitHub: Automate It Right
GitHub is not just a code hosting platform. It is your public engineering ledger. It shows how you think, how you structure problems, how you document tradeoffs, and how you ship. If you build software and it never lands on GitHub, as far as the wider technical world is concerned, it does not exist. This […]
Read more →WordPress Plugin Upgrades: Fix Stale File Issues
Most WordPress plugin developers eventually hit the same invisible wall: you ship an update, everything looks correct in the zip, the version number changes, the code is cleaner, and yet users report that the old JavaScript is still running. You check the file. It is updated. They clear cache. Still broken. Here is the uncomfortable […]
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How to Lead Engineering Teams Without Technical Knowledge
Health warning: This article may not make you feel happy, it may not suit you to read this article. I am not even sure I necessarily believe everything I am saying here – but I do believe in personally reflecting on the challenging questions being posed in this article to try make myself a better […]
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