This is my blog, which I will be updating fairly regulary. Please remember to take everything I say with a pinch of salt, it’s really just my opinion on things.
- Why Promoting Your Best Manager Will Not Give You a LeaderThere is a word that does not exist yet but should. Leaderment. It describes the unhappy hybrid that most organisations have actually built when they thought they were building leadership capability. Not leadership. Not management. Something in between that does the job of neither particularly well and leaves everyone quietly … Continue reading “Why Promoting Your Best Manager Will Not Give You a Leader”
- The JATO Organisation: Why Bolting AI onto Your Existing Structure Is a Darwin Award in Progress
There is an old urban legend, immortalised as one of the original Darwin Award nominations, about a man who bolted a JATO unit to a 1967 Chevrolet Impala. JATO stands for Jet Assisted Take Off. It is a solid fuel rocket designed to give heavy military transport aircraft the extra … Continue reading “The JATO Organisation: Why Bolting AI onto Your Existing Structure Is a Darwin Award in Progress” - Captive Gratitude: How Product Team Structures Inflate Engineer Performance Ratings
There is a product team performance bias hiding in plain sight inside every organisation that has moved to product aligned engineering, except that it does not show up as a number on a dashboard, a flag in a talent calibration session, or a red line in an engagement survey. It … Continue reading “Captive Gratitude: How Product Team Structures Inflate Engineer Performance Ratings” - Knowing Your IOPS Are Broken Is Not As Valuable As Knowing They Are About To Break
Andrew Baker | March 2026 Companion article to: https://andrewbaker.ninja/2026/03/01/the-silent-killer-in-your-aws-architecture-iops-mismatches/ Last week I published a script that scans your AWS estate and finds every EBS volume and RDS instance where your provisioned storage IOPS exceed what the compute instance can actually consume. That problem, the structural mismatch between storage ceiling and … Continue reading “Knowing Your IOPS Are Broken Is Not As Valuable As Knowing They Are About To Break” - Install Chrome MCP for Claude Desktop in a single scriptIf you have ever sat there manually clicking through a UI, copying error messages, and pasting them into Claude just to get help debugging something, I have good news. There is a better way. Chrome MCP gives Claude Desktop direct access to your Chrome browser, allowing it to read the … Continue reading “Install Chrome MCP for Claude Desktop in a single script”
- You just Uploaded a new Plugin and your WordPress Site Just Crashed. Now What?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. … Continue reading “You just Uploaded a new Plugin and your WordPress Site Just Crashed. Now What?”
- Transcripts from the Meeting Where Core Banking was Invented (A Faithful Reconstruction)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 … Continue reading “Transcripts from the Meeting Where Core Banking was Invented (A Faithful Reconstruction)”
- The Silent Killer in Your AWS Architecture: IOPS MismatchesAndrew 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 … Continue reading “The Silent Killer in Your AWS Architecture: IOPS Mismatches”
- How to Use Google to Find Who Is Talking About You Without Your Own Site Getting in the WayIf 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 … Continue reading “How to Use Google to Find Who Is Talking About You Without Your Own Site Getting in the Way”
- How to Share Files Between Claude Desktop and Your Local Mac Filesystem Using MCPIf 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 … Continue reading “How to Share Files Between Claude Desktop and Your Local Mac Filesystem Using MCP”
- Simple Guide to Publishing Your Code on GitHubGitHub 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, … Continue reading “Simple Guide to Publishing Your Code on GitHub”
- How to Make WordPress Plugin Upgrades Clean Up ProperlyMost 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 … Continue reading “How to Make WordPress Plugin Upgrades Clean Up Properly”
- How to Manage Technologists If You Don’t Know Anything About Technology
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 … Continue reading “How to Manage Technologists If You Don’t Know Anything About Technology” - CloudScale PageViews – Free WordPress Analytics that Work Behind Cloudflare
If you run a WordPress site behind Cloudflare, your page view numbers are lying to you. Jetpack Stats, WP Statistics, Post Views Counter and nearly every other WordPress analytics plugin share the same fatal flaw: they count views on the server. When Cloudflare serves a cached HTML page (which is … Continue reading “CloudScale PageViews – Free WordPress Analytics that Work Behind Cloudflare” - Building a Better Code Block for WordPress: CloudScale Code Block Plugin
If you run a technical blog on WordPress, you know the pain. You paste a markdown article with fenced code blocks, Gutenberg creates bland core/code blocks with no syntax highlighting, no copy button, no dark mode. You end up wrestling with third party plugins that haven’t been updated in years … Continue reading “Building a Better Code Block for WordPress: CloudScale Code Block Plugin” - Net Time to First Byte (NTTFB): The Metric TTFB Should Have Been
Andrew Baker · February 2026 · andrewbaker.ninja 1 The Problem with TTFB Time to First Byte has been the go to diagnostic for server responsiveness since the early days of web performance engineering. Google’s own web.dev guidance describes TTFB as measuring the elapsed time between the start of navigation and … Continue reading “Net Time to First Byte (NTTFB): The Metric TTFB Should Have Been” - Website Optimisation: Stop Waiting for FontsStop Waiting for Fonts Quick Guide to font-display: swap on macOS Your website might be secretly blocking page renders while it waits for fancy custom fonts to load. This invisible delay tanks your Core Web Vitals and frustrates users. The fix is simple: font-display: swap. Here’s how to audit your … Continue reading “Website Optimisation: Stop Waiting for Fonts”
- The Pilot Trap: Why Your AI Project Will Never See Production
Gartner says 40% of agentic AI projects will fail by 2027. I think they’re being optimistic. Walk into almost any large enterprise right now and you’ll find the same scene: a glossy AI pilot, a proud press release, a steering committee meeting monthly to “track progress,” and an absolutely zero … Continue reading “The Pilot Trap: Why Your AI Project Will Never See Production” - WordPress Space Cleanup: A Free WordPress Databas, Media Library Cleanup Plugin and PNG to JPEG convertor
If you run a WordPress site for any length of time, the database quietly fills with junk. Post revisions stack up every time you hit Save. Drafts you abandoned years ago sit there. Spam comments accumulate. Transients expire but never get deleted. Orphaned metadata from plugins you uninstalled months ago … Continue reading “WordPress Space Cleanup: A Free WordPress Databas, Media Library Cleanup Plugin and PNG to JPEG convertor” - What is Minification and How to Test if it is Actually Working1. What is Minification Minification is the process of removing everything from source code that a browser does not need to execute it. This includes whitespace, line breaks, comments, and long variable names. The resulting file is functionally identical to the original but significantly smaller. A CSS file written for … Continue reading “What is Minification and How to Test if it is Actually Working”
- Stop Selling Hampers: Why Enterprise Software Tiering Is a Self-Defeating Strategy
By Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec Bank There is a category of enterprise technology vendor whose approach to pricing is so fundamentally at odds with how purchasing decisions actually get made that it borders on self-defeating. Their commercial model is built on access gates, bundled tiers, and a deeply held … Continue reading “Stop Selling Hampers: Why Enterprise Software Tiering Is a Self-Defeating Strategy” - WordPress Totally Free Backup and Restore: CloudScale Backup Plugin – Does Exactly What It Says
I’ve been running this blog on WordPress for years, and the backup situation has always quietly bothered me. The popular backup plugins either charge a monthly fee, cap you on storage, phone home to an external service, or do all three. I wanted something simple: a plugin that makes a … Continue reading “WordPress Totally Free Backup and Restore: CloudScale Backup Plugin – Does Exactly What It Says” - Eliminating Render-Blocking JavaScript: The Easiest Core Web Vitals Win You’re Not TakingIf you’ve run your site through Google PageSpeed Insights and seen the “Eliminate render-blocking resources” warning, you’ve probably wondered why something that sounds so simple is so hard to actually fix. The answer is that WordPress makes it surprisingly easy to load JavaScript the wrong way — and surprisingly difficult … Continue reading “Eliminating Render-Blocking JavaScript: The Easiest Core Web Vitals Win You’re Not Taking”
- The Quantum Threat: Why the Encryption Protecting Your Data Today Won’t Survive Tomorrow
Published on andrewbaker.ninja | Enterprise Architecture & Banking Technology There is a quiet revolution happening in physics laboratories around the world, and most of the people who should be worried about it are not paying attention yet. That is about to change. Quantum computing is advancing faster than anyone predicted … Continue reading “The Quantum Threat: Why the Encryption Protecting Your Data Today Won’t Survive Tomorrow” - Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was.
The COBOL apocalypse conversation this week has been useful, because it has forced the industry to confront something it has been avoiding for decades. But most of the coverage is stopping at the wrong point. Everyone is talking about COBOL. Nobody is talking about the architectural philosophy that COBOL gave … Continue reading “Core Banking Is a Terrible Idea. It Always Was.” - CloudScale SEO AI Optimiser: Enterprise Grade WordPress SEO, Completely Free
Written by Andrew Baker | February 2026 I spent years working across major financial institutions watching vendors charge eye-watering licence fees for tools that were, frankly, not that impressive. That instinct never left me. So when I wanted serious SEO for my personal tech blog, I built my own WordPress … Continue reading “CloudScale SEO AI Optimiser: Enterprise Grade WordPress SEO, Completely Free” - The Blog Post That Erased $30 Billion from IBM
Anthropic published a blog post on Monday. Not a product launch, not a partnership announcement, not a keynote at a major conference. Just a simple blog post explaining that Claude Code can read COBOL. IBM proceeded to drop 13%, its worst single day loss since October 2000, with twenty five … Continue reading “The Blog Post That Erased $30 Billion from IBM” - The Quiet Power of Free Tier: Why Cloudflare Gets It Right
By Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec Bank There is a truth that most technology vendors either do not understand or choose to ignore: the best sales pitch you will ever make is letting someone use your product for free. Not a watered-down demo, not a 14-day trial that expires before … Continue reading “The Quiet Power of Free Tier: Why Cloudflare Gets It Right” - The Futility of Corporate Heckling
There is a peculiar sport played in large organisations. It looks like leadership and sounds like governance, hiding behind frameworks, maturity models, and operating rhythms. But in reality it is something far less noble. It is corporate heckling. Corporate heckling is what happens when a function narrates from the sidelines … Continue reading “The Futility of Corporate Heckling” - The Leadership Event Horizon
1. The Shoe Planet Problem In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, there is a planet where the inhabitants become so obsessed with shoes that the shoes eventually take over. The civilisation does not collapse because it lacks intelligence. It collapses because something peripheral accumulates mass until it dominates everything … Continue reading “The Leadership Event Horizon” - Business Heads: Technology Leadership Competence AssessmentThis is an assessment. It is not balanced. It is not here to validate your instincts, your planning methodology, or your confidence in the delivery framework you inherited. It exists to surface how you actually think about technology leadership when you are deciding whether to trust an engineer, approve a … Continue reading “Business Heads: Technology Leadership Competence Assessment”
- The Operating System: What Logic First Leadership Means
1. The System That Built Everything I have spent my entire career inside a single operating system. Logic first. Reality over narrative. Strip the problem down, find the root cause, fix it, move on. Do not waste time on feelings that will resolve themselves once the facts are clear. Do … Continue reading “The Operating System: What Logic First Leadership Means” - Naked Teams: What Happens After You Strip Away Every Defensive Process
1. The Uncomfortable Silence After the Music Stops Every organisation that runs on defensive process has a soundtrack. Standups hum at 9am. Sprint reviews crackle on Fridays. Retros generate their familiar low frequency guilt. Planning ceremonies fill the gaps. Remove all of it and the first thing you hear is … Continue reading “Naked Teams: What Happens After You Strip Away Every Defensive Process” - Corporate Culture: Toxic Ownership Optimised for Leaders, Not for Clients
1. Ownership Has Been Turned Into a Moral Shortcut Ownership has become one of the most lazily celebrated concepts in modern organisations. Leaders demand it reflexively, teams chase it performatively, and entire operating models are justified by invoking it as if ownership itself produces outcomes. It does not. Ownership is … Continue reading “Corporate Culture: Toxic Ownership Optimised for Leaders, Not for Clients” - Every Good Idea I’ve Had Started With Me Doing Absolutely Nothing1. Fear, Motion, and the Illusion of Progress In the last few months I’ve come up with two of the most powerful fraud controls of my career. Not in a workshop. Not in a brainstorm with sticky notes and a facilitator. I walked to the car park, lay down in … Continue reading “Every Good Idea I’ve Had Started With Me Doing Absolutely Nothing”
- Business Heads: Technology Leadership Competence AssessmentA Self Assessment for Technology Leaders This questionnaire explores how you think about technology leadership, systems, teams, and delivery. There are no right or wrong answers. Each question presents four options that reflect different leadership styles and priorities. Simply select the option that best reflects your natural instinct in each … Continue reading “Business Heads: Technology Leadership Competence Assessment”
- Automatically Recovering a Failed WordPress Instance on AWSWhen WordPress goes down on your AWS instance, waiting for manual intervention means downtime and lost revenue. Here are two robust approaches to automatically detect and recover from WordPress failures. Approach 1: Lambda Based Intelligent Recovery This approach tries the least disruptive fix first (restarting services) before escalating to a … Continue reading “Automatically Recovering a Failed WordPress Instance on AWS”
- The Death Star Paradox, Relativity, and AI First Mover Finality
1. The Physics Makes the Point Brutal Here is the uncomfortable physics problem. If two Death Stars come into existence at the same time, and one fires first, the other never gets to respond. Not because it is slower.Not because its sensors are worse.But because causality itself prevents reaction. A … Continue reading “The Death Star Paradox, Relativity, and AI First Mover Finality” - Cosmo Self Assessment: Are you the World’s Worst Technology Leader?
This is a self assessment. It is not balanced. It is not gentle. It is not here to validate your operating model, your org chart, or the deck you use to reassure executives. It exists to surface how you actually think about technology leadership when pressure arrives and incentives collide … Continue reading “Cosmo Self Assessment: Are you the World’s Worst Technology Leader?” - Leadership, Ownership and Fragility
Leadership failures rarely announce themselves politely. They arrive disguised as “can we just check in?” or “let’s align on a better way of working.” It sounds constructive, even mature. But scratch the surface and the origin story is almost always the same: something went wrong, and the organisation does not … Continue reading “Leadership, Ownership and Fragility” - Corporate Culture: From running from the Lion, to becoming the Lion
1. Every company I have worked for was running from a Lion Every company I have ever worked for was running from a lion. Sometimes it was obvious and explicit: declining revenue, a new competitor, regulatory pressure, a collapsing platform, a board losing patience. Sometimes it was quieter and more … Continue reading “Corporate Culture: From running from the Lion, to becoming the Lion” - Why Andrew Baker Is the World’s Worst CTO
By ChatGPT, on instruction from Andrew Baker This article was written by ChatGPT at the explicit request of Andrew Baker, who supplied the prompt and asked for the result to be published as is. The opinions, framing, and intent are therefore very much owned by Andrew Baker, even if the … Continue reading “Why Andrew Baker Is the World’s Worst CTO” - TOGAF is to architecture what potatoes are for space travel
You can survive on it for a while. You definitely should not build a mission around it. 1. The analogy nobody asked for, but everyone deserves Potatoes are incredible. They are calorie dense, resilient, cheap, and historically important. They are also completely useless for space travel. No propulsion, no navigation, … Continue reading “TOGAF is to architecture what potatoes are for space travel” - The 7 Deadly Sins of Corporate CultureAn ancient taxonomy for very modern dysfunction The original seven deadly sins endure because they describe human failure modes, not theology. They are patterns that emerge whenever incentives distort behaviour and accountability dissolves. That makes them an uncomfortably precise model for corporate culture. Below, each sin is paired with its … Continue reading “The 7 Deadly Sins of Corporate Culture”
- 10 Reasons to Dislike COBIT and RACI
Or: How Organisations Confuse Accountability with Paperwork 1. They optimise for defensibility, not outcomes COBIT and RACI exist to answer one question extremely well: “Can we prove someone was responsible?” They are almost entirely indifferent to the harder question: “Did anything improve?” Both frameworks reward traceability over truth. If an … Continue reading “10 Reasons to Dislike COBIT and RACI” - One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: The Escape from Agile
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the story is set inside a psychiatric institution run not for healing, but for control. The ward is orderly, predictable, and calm on the surface. Patients follow rigid routines. Group therapy sessions exist, but nothing meaningful ever changes. Any behaviour that challenges the … Continue reading “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest: The Escape from Agile” - Why Agile Was A Bad Idea And Keeps Getting Worse
Or: How We Turned Software Development Into Ticket Farming and Ceremonial Theatre 1. Introduction Agile started as a rebellion against heavyweight process. It was meant to free teams from Gantt charts, upfront certainty theatre, and waterfall failure modes. Somewhere along the way, Agile became exactly what it claimed to replace: … Continue reading “Why Agile Was A Bad Idea And Keeps Getting Worse” - Intelligence vs Wisdom: Why the Smartest People Keep Blowing Things Up
1. Definitions First (Because This Matters) Intelligence is the ability to acquire knowledge, process information, identify patterns, and solve problems. It answers the question: Can we do this? Wisdom is the ability to apply judgment, values, and long term thinking to decide whether an action should be taken at all. … Continue reading “Intelligence vs Wisdom: Why the Smartest People Keep Blowing Things Up” - The Dishonest Process of Technology Planning
1. Estimation Fails Exactly Where It Is Demanded Most Estimation is most aggressively demanded in workstreams with the highest discovery, the highest uncertainty, and the highest intellectual property density. This is not an accident. The more uncomfortable the terrain, the more organisations reach for the false comfort of numbers. In … Continue reading “The Dishonest Process of Technology Planning” - Email Trees, One Finger Typists, and the Corporate Refusal to Collaborate Properly
Email trees are not an accident. They are the predictable outcome of organisations repeatedly using the wrong tool for the wrong job. Despite decades of evidence, email is still treated as a collaboration platform rather than what it actually is: a slow, lossy message delivery system. The result is wasted … Continue reading “Email Trees, One Finger Typists, and the Corporate Refusal to Collaborate Properly” - Corporate Herding: When Meetings Replace Thinking
1. The Dead Giveaway Is the Meeting Itself There is a reliable early warning signal that corporate herding is about to occur: the meeting invite. No meaningful agenda. No pre reading. No shared intellectual property. No framing of the problem. Just a vague title, an hour blocked out, and a … Continue reading “Corporate Herding: When Meetings Replace Thinking” - The 10 Biggest Differences Between Windows Server and Linux for Enterprises
Enterprise operating systems for servers, are not chosen because they are liked. They are chosen because they survive stress. At scale, an operating system stops being a piece of software and becomes an amplifier of either discipline or entropy. Every abstraction, compatibility promise, and hidden convenience eventually expresses itself under … Continue reading “The 10 Biggest Differences Between Windows Server and Linux for Enterprises” - The Power of Motives: Why Culture Is Revealed When Control Is Released
Culture is not revealed by behaviour under control, but by motive under autonomy. Highly controlled environments mask intent and allow organisations to promote leaders whose inner compass has never been tested. When controls are later removed at seniority, behaviour shocks leadership and risk materialises. Durable outcomes, whether in fraud prevention, … Continue reading “The Power of Motives: Why Culture Is Revealed When Control Is Released” - Managing Organisational Bloat: What Does Everyone Do?
1. The Question That Exposes Everything Walk into any large organisation and ask a deceptively simple question: “What does everyone do?” Not what are your job titles, not what does your org chart say, but what do people actually do all day. The silence that follows is never accidental. This … Continue reading “Managing Organisational Bloat: What Does Everyone Do?” - Is Banking Complexity a Shared Destiny or Is It a Leadership Failure?If you look back over time at all once great companies, you will see that eventually simplicity gave way to scale. What are some of the risks that drive this? This is where many great banks lose their edge. But is this really a shared destiny for all banks, or … Continue reading “Is Banking Complexity a Shared Destiny or Is It a Leadership Failure?”
- Why Low Trust Organisations Confuse Control with Delivery1. The Organisation That Optimised for Distrust I once worked in a company with spectacularly low trust. Everything took ages (like years), quality was inconsistent (at best),costs were extraordinary and there was almost no common understanding of why things were so bad. Clients were charged a small fortune for products … Continue reading “Why Low Trust Organisations Confuse Control with Delivery”
- Stability : The Water of Life for Engineering
Why do Companies Get Stability So Wrong? Most companies do not fail because they cannot innovate. They fail because they misjudge stability. Some organisations under invest. They chase features, growth, and deadlines while stability quietly drains away. Outages feel sudden. Incidents feel unfair. Leadership asks how this happened “out of … Continue reading “Stability : The Water of Life for Engineering” - The New Engineering Equation: Why AI Is Tipping the Table Back to the Builders
I have started writing production code again. Not prototypes. Not proofs of concept. Real systems. Real risk. Real consequences. At Capitec, a very small group of engineers is now tackling something that would historically have demanded hundreds of people: large scale rewrites of core internet banking capabilities. This is not … Continue reading “The New Engineering Equation: Why AI Is Tipping the Table Back to the Builders” - The Famine of Wisdom in the Age of Data Gluttony
Why More Information Doesn’t Mean More Understanding We’ve all heard the mantra: data is the new oil. It’s become the rallying cry of digital transformation programmes, investor pitches, and boardroom strategy sessions. But here’s what nobody mentions when they trot out that tired metaphor: oil stinks. It’s toxic. It’s extraordinarily … Continue reading “The Famine of Wisdom in the Age of Data Gluttony” - The Frustration of the Infinite Game
1. Technology Is an Infinite Game and That Is the Point Technology has no finish line. There is no end state, no final architecture, no moment where you can stand back and declare victory and go home. It is an infinite game made up of a long sequence of hard … Continue reading “The Frustration of the Infinite Game” - Disaster Recovery Theater: Why Most DR Exercises Achieve Almost Nothing
Disaster recovery is one of the most comforting practices in enterprise technology and one of the least honest. Organisations spend significant time and money designing DR strategies, running carefully choreographed exercises, producing polished post exercise reports, and reassuring themselves that they are prepared for major outages. The problem is not … Continue reading “Disaster Recovery Theater: Why Most DR Exercises Achieve Almost Nothing” - Redis vs Valkey: A Deep Dive for Enterprise Architects
The in memory data store landscape fractured in March 2024 when Redis Inc abandoned its BSD 3-clause licence in favour of the dual RSALv2/SSPLv1 model. The community response was swift and surgical: Valkey emerged as a Linux Foundation backed fork, supported by AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle, Alibaba, Tencent, and Ericsson. … Continue reading “Redis vs Valkey: A Deep Dive for Enterprise Architects” - Scaling Mobile Chat to Millions: Architecture Decisions for Apache Pekko, SSE, and Java 25
Real time mobile chat represents one of the most demanding challenges in distributed systems architecture. Unlike web applications where connections are relatively stable, mobile clients constantly transition between networks, experience variable latency, and must conserve battery while maintaining instant message delivery. This post examines the architectural decisions behind building mobile … Continue reading “Scaling Mobile Chat to Millions: Architecture Decisions for Apache Pekko, SSE, and Java 25” - The Last Mile Fallacy
1. Introduction Organisations like to believe they reward outcomes. In reality, they reward visibility. This is the essence of the Last Mile Fallacy: the mistaken belief that the final visible step in a chain of work is where most of the value was created. We tip the waiter rather than … Continue reading “The Last Mile Fallacy” - Create / Migrate WordPress to AWS Graviton: Maximum Performance, Minimum CostRunning WordPress on ARM-based Graviton instances delivers up to 40% better price-performance compared to x86 equivalents. This guide provides production-ready scripts to deploy an optimised WordPress stack in minutes, plus everything you need to migrate your existing site. Why Graviton for WordPress? Graviton3 processors deliver: The t4g.small instance (2 vCPU, … Continue reading “Create / Migrate WordPress to AWS Graviton: Maximum Performance, Minimum Cost”
- Incompetence Asymmetry: Deference, Delusion, and Delivery Failures
There’s a peculiar asymmetry in how humans handle their own incompetence. It reveals itself most starkly when you compare two scenarios: a cancer patient undergoing chemotherapy, and a project manager pushing delivery dates on a complex technology initiative. Both involve life altering stakes. Both require deep expertise the decision maker … Continue reading “Incompetence Asymmetry: Deference, Delusion, and Delivery Failures” - Vibe Coding: AI Can Write Code But It Cannot Own the Consequences
AI is a powerful accelerator when problems are well defined and bounded, but in complex greenfield systems vague intent hardens into architecture and creates long term risk that no amount of automation can undo. 1. What Vibe Coding Really Is Vibe coding is the practice of describing intent in natural … Continue reading “Vibe Coding: AI Can Write Code But It Cannot Own the Consequences” - Darwinian Architecture Philosophy: How Domain Isolation Creates Evolutionary Pressure for Better Software
Darwinian Architecture Philosophy How Domain Isolation Creates Evolutionary Pressure for Better Software After two decades building trading platforms and banking systems, I’ve watched the same pattern repeat itself countless times. A production incident occurs. The war room fills. And then the finger pointing begins. “It’s the database team’s problem.” “No, … Continue reading “Darwinian Architecture Philosophy: How Domain Isolation Creates Evolutionary Pressure for Better Software” - Protected: The Salesforce Reckoning: How AI Democratisation Is Dismantling the Enterprise Platform Moat
This content is password protected. - Corporate Humility Is a Survival Trait
Most organisations don’t fail because they lack intelligence, capital, or ambition. They fail because leadership becomes arrogant, distant, and insulated from reality. What Is Humility? Humility is the quality of having a modest view of one’s own importance. It is an accurate assessment of one’s strengths and limitations, combined with … Continue reading “Corporate Humility Is a Survival Trait” - Aurora PostgreSQL: Archiving and Restoring Partitions from Large Tables to Iceberg and Parquet on S3
A Complete Guide to Archiving, Restoring, and Querying Large Table Partitions When dealing with multi-terabyte tables in Aurora PostgreSQL, keeping historical partitions online becomes increasingly expensive and operationally burdensome. This guide presents a complete solution for archiving partitions to S3 in Iceberg/Parquet format, restoring them when needed, and querying archived … Continue reading “Aurora PostgreSQL: Archiving and Restoring Partitions from Large Tables to Iceberg and Parquet on S3” - Banking in South Africa: Abundance, Pressure, and the Coming Consolidation
I wanted to write about the trends we can see playing out, both in South Africa and globally with respect to: Large Retailers, Mobile Networks, Banking, Insurance and Technology. These thoughts are my own and I am often wrong, so dont get too excited if you dont agree with me … Continue reading “Banking in South Africa: Abundance, Pressure, and the Coming Consolidation” - The Death of the Enterprise Service Bus: Why Kafka and Microservices Are Winning
1. Introduction The Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) once promised to be the silver bullet for enterprise integration. Organizations invested millions in platforms like MuleSoft, IBM Integration Bus, Oracle Service Bus, and TIBCO BusinessWorks, believing they would solve all their integration challenges. Today, these same organizations are discovering that their ESB … Continue reading “The Death of the Enterprise Service Bus: Why Kafka and Microservices Are Winning” - Model Context Protocol: A Comprehensive Guide for Enterprise ImplementationThe Model Context Protocol (MCP) represents a fundamental shift in how we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) with external data sources and tools. As enterprises increasingly adopt AI powered applications, understanding MCP’s architecture, operational characteristics, and practical implementation becomes critical for technical leaders building production systems. 1. What is Model … Continue reading “Model Context Protocol: A Comprehensive Guide for Enterprise Implementation”
- Understanding and Detecting CVE-2024-3094: The React2Shell SSH BackdoorExecutive Summary CVE-2024-3094 represents one of the most sophisticated supply chain attacks in recent history. Discovered in March 2024, this vulnerability embedded a backdoor into XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1, allowing attackers to compromise SSH authentication on Linux systems. With a CVSS score of 10.0 (Critical), this attack demonstrates … Continue reading “Understanding and Detecting CVE-2024-3094: The React2Shell SSH Backdoor”
- Testing Maximum HTTP/2 Concurrent Streams for Your Website1. Introduction Understanding and testing your server’s maximum concurrent stream configuration is critical for both performance tuning and security hardening against HTTP/2 attacks. This guide provides comprehensive tools and techniques to test the SETTINGS_MAX_CONCURRENT_STREAMS parameter on your web servers. This article complements our previous guide on Testing Your Website for … Continue reading “Testing Maximum HTTP/2 Concurrent Streams for Your Website”
- Testing Your Website for HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Vulnerabilities from a macOSIntroduction In August 2023, a critical zero day vulnerability in the HTTP/2 protocol was disclosed that affected virtually every HTTP/2 capable web server and proxy. Known as HTTP/2 Rapid Reset (CVE 2023 44487), this vulnerability enabled attackers to launch devastating Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks with minimal resources. Google … Continue reading “Testing Your Website for HTTP/2 Rapid Reset Vulnerabilities from a macOS”
- Why Bigger Banks Were Historically More Fragile and Why Architecture Determines Resilience
1. Size Was Once Mistaken for Stability For most of modern banking history, stability was assumed to increase with size. The thinking was the bigger you are, the more you should care, the more resources you can apply to problems. Larger banks had more capital, more infrastructure, and more people. … Continue reading “Why Bigger Banks Were Historically More Fragile and Why Architecture Determines Resilience” - Comparing OSPF to Human Workload Resolution1. Introduction In networking, OSPF (Open Shortest Path First) is a routing protocol that ensures traffic flows along the shortest and lowest cost path through a network. It does not care about hierarchy, seniority, or intent. It routes based on capability, cost, and reliability. Modern engineering organisations behave in exactly … Continue reading “Comparing OSPF to Human Workload Resolution”
- A Deep Dive into Java 25 Virtual Threads: From Thread Per Request to Lightweight Concurrency
1. Introduction Java’s concurrency model has undergone a revolutionary transformation with the introduction of Virtual Threads in Java 19 (as a preview feature) and their stabilization in Java 21. With Java 25, virtual threads have reached new levels of maturity by addressing critical pinning issues that previously limited their effectiveness. … Continue reading “A Deep Dive into Java 25 Virtual Threads: From Thread Per Request to Lightweight Concurrency” - Deep Dive: Pauseless Garbage Collection in Java 25
1. Introduction Garbage collection has long been both a blessing and a curse in Java development. While automatic memory management frees developers from manual allocation and deallocation, traditional garbage collectors introduced unpredictable stop the world pauses that could severely impact application responsiveness. For latency sensitive applications such as high frequency … Continue reading “Deep Dive: Pauseless Garbage Collection in Java 25” - Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Prepared Statements: When Plan Caching Goes Wrong leading to Memory ExhaustionPrepared statements are one of PostgreSQL’s most powerful features for query optimization. By parsing and planning queries once, then reusing those plans for subsequent executions, they can dramatically improve performance. But this optimization comes with a hidden danger: sometimes caching the same plan for every execution can lead to catastrophic … Continue reading “Deep Dive into PostgreSQL Prepared Statements: When Plan Caching Goes Wrong leading to Memory Exhaustion”
- Stablecoins: A Comprehensive Guide1. What Are Stablecoins? Stablecoins are a type of cryptocurrency designed to maintain a stable value by pegging themselves to a reserve asset, typically a fiat currency like the US dollar. Unlike volatile cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which can experience dramatic price swings, stablecoins aim to provide the … Continue reading “Stablecoins: A Comprehensive Guide”
- Building an advanced Browser Curl Script with Playwright and Selenium for load testing websitesModern sites often block plain curl. Using a real browser engine (Chromium via Playwright) gives you true browser behavior: real TLS/HTTP2 stack, cookies, redirects, and JavaScript execution if needed. This post mirrors the functionality of the original browser_curl.sh wrapper but implemented with Playwright. It also includes an optional Selenium mini-variant … Continue reading “Building an advanced Browser Curl Script with Playwright and Selenium for load testing websites”
- Technology Culture: The Sinking Car Syndrome
The Sinking Car Syndrome: When Your Architecture Is Terminal There are two types of post-incident reviews in technology. The first type is genuinely useful, where you learn something, fix something, and sleep better. The second type is an elaborate ritual in which intelligent adults spend considerable time and money figuring … Continue reading “Technology Culture: The Sinking Car Syndrome” - AWS: Install and configure the AWS CLI on a MacbookYou can absolutely get the following from the AWS help pages; but this is the lazy way to get everything you need for a simple single account setup. Run the two commands below to drop the package on your Mac. Then check the versions you have installed: Next you need … Continue reading “AWS: Install and configure the AWS CLI on a Macbook”
- AWS: Automatically Stop and Start your EC2 ServicesBelow is a quick (am busy) outline on how to automatically stop and start your EC2 instances. Step 1: Tag your resources In order to decide which instances stop and start you first need to add an auto-start-stop: Yes tag to all the instances you want to be affected by the start … Continue reading “AWS: Automatically Stop and Start your EC2 Services”
- How to Optimise your Technology Teams Structure to improve flowI have seen many organisations restructure their technology teams over and over, but whichever model they opt for – they never seem to be able to get the desired results with respect to speed, resilience and quality. For this reason organisations will tend to oscillate from centralised teams, which are … Continue reading “How to Optimise your Technology Teams Structure to improve flow”
- Macbook: Fixing the Wireshark Permissions bug “You don’t have permission to capture on that device”If you see the error “The capture session could not be initiated on the device “en0″ (You don’t have permission to capture on that device)” when trying to start a pcap on wireshare you can try installing ChmodBPF; but I suspect you will need to follow the steps below:
- Linux: Automatically renew your certs for a wordpress site using letsencryptIf you want to automatically renew your certs then the easiest way is to setup a cron just to call letsencrypt periodically. Below is an example cron job: First create the bash script to renew the certificate Now enter the script in the following format into nano: Now edit the … Continue reading “Linux: Automatically renew your certs for a wordpress site using letsencrypt”
- Technologists: Please Stop asking for requirements 😎I think you’re a genius! You found this blog and your reading it – what more evidence do I need?! So why do you keep asking others to think for you? There is a harmful bias built into most technology projects that assumes “the customer knows best” and this is … Continue reading “Technologists: Please Stop asking for requirements 😎”
- How to trigger Scaling Events using Stress-ng CommandIf you are testing how your autoscaling policies respond to CPU load then a really simple way to test this is using the “stress” command. Note: this is a very crude mechanism to test and wherever possible you should try and generate synthetic application load.
- How to Install Apps From Anywhere on Apple MacPreviously Macs would allow you to install software from anywhere. Now you will see the error message “NMAPxx.mpkg cannot be opened because its from an unidentified developer”. If you want to fix this and enable apps to be install from anywhere, you will need to run the following command line: … Continue reading “How to Install Apps From Anywhere on Apple Mac”
- Definition: Bonuscidebonuscide noun Definition of bonuscide: Bonuscide is a term used to describe incentive schemes that progressively poisons an organisation by ensuring the flow of discretionary pay is non does not serve the organisations goals. These schemes can be observed in two main ways, the loss of key staff or the … Continue reading “Definition: Bonuscide”
- Part 2: Increasing your Cloud consumption (the sane way)Introduction This article follows on from the “Cloud Migrations Crusade” blog post… A single tenancy datacenter is a fixed scale, fixed price service on a closed network. The costs of the resources in the datacenter are divided up and shared out to the enterprise constituents on a semi-random basis. If … Continue reading “Part 2: Increasing your Cloud consumption (the sane way)”
- The Least Privileged LieIn technology, there is a tendency to solve a problem badly by using gross simplification, then come up with a catchy one liner and then broadcast this as doctrine or a principle. Nothing ticks more boxes in this regard, than the principle of least privileges. The ensuing enterprise scale deadlocks … Continue reading “The Least Privileged Lie”
- AWS: Making use of S3s ETags to check if a file has been alteredI was playing with S3 the other day an I noticed that a file which I had uploaded twice, in two different locations had an identical ETag. This immediately made me think that this tag was some kind of hash. So I had a quick look AWS documentation and this … Continue reading “AWS: Making use of S3s ETags to check if a file has been altered”
- Using TPC-H tools to Create Test Data for AWS Redshift and AWS EMRIf you need to test out your big data tools below is a useful set of scripts that I have used in the past for aws emr and redshift the below might be helpful:
- AWS: Please Fix Poor Error Messages, API standards and Bad DefaultingThis is a short blog, and its actually just simple a plea to AWS. Please can you do three things? North Virginia appears to be the AWS master node. Having this region as a master region causes a large number of support issues (for example S3, KMS, Cloudfront, ACM all … Continue reading “AWS: Please Fix Poor Error Messages, API standards and Bad Defaulting”
- The Triplication ParadigmIntroduction In most large corporates technology will typically report into either finance or operations. This means that it will tend to be subject to cultural inheritance, which is not always a good thing. One example of where the cultural default should be challenged is when managing IP duplication. In finance or … Continue reading “The Triplication Paradigm”