Most organisations believe their interview process selects for leadership. It does not. It selects for the ability to perform leadership in a low stakes, well prepared, time limited conversation in…
Read more →Published on andrewbaker.ninja It is 09:47 on a Tuesday morning. A researcher publishes a new CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) for a widely deployed authentication library. The advisory goes live.…
Read more →Most outages are not caused by a single bug. They are caused by teams that have gradually lost a coherent mental model of the system they operate. Kubernetes retries. Queues…
Read more →Andrew Baker · May 2026 I get asked a lot of questions about how Capitec secures its customers’ money. Not in the abstract, but the real ones: what happens if…
Read more →1. The Corporate Voice Is Losing Credibility A strange thing is happening in executive communication. The more polished it becomes, the less believable it feels. For years, large organizations trained…
Read more →Or: What to do after you have spent years writing posts that scare people. There is a pattern in my writing that I have only recently started to see clearly.…
Read more →There is nowhere left to hide. For decades, banks built an elegant asymmetry into the relationship with their customers. The bank had a team of specialists, the time to design…
Read more →1. The Rugby Lesson Most People Learn the Hard Way If you have ever played rugby, you learn very quickly what a handoff is. You approach a player too high,…
Read more →Catastrophic system outages are never purely accidental because the conditions enabling them accumulate quietly over time, embedded within organizational structures, incentive misalignments, and suppressed warning signals. Like destructive human behaviour,…
Read more →1. The terminal should not look like punishment Most developer terminals look like they were designed by someone who believes productivity is a moral debt. Black box. Tiny text. No…
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