Engineering Leadership: Hard Truths for Tech Leaders
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Why your best engineers leave, how bad org structures quietly destroy teams, and what separates engineering leaders who scale from those who stall.
Vibe Coding Risks: Why AI Cannot Own Architectural Decisions
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 language and allowing AI to […]
Read more →Why Least Privilege Security Is a Lie: 3 Root Causes
In 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 created by a crippling implementation […]
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Why TOGAF Fails Modern Enterprise Architecture
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, no life support, no guidance […]
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Enterprise Software Tiering: Why Bundle Pricing Fails
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 belief that controlling what a […]
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DR Exercises Are Broken: Why Most Disaster Recovery Fails
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 intent. The problem is that […]
Read more →Stop Asking for Requirements: Think Like a Technologist
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 simply a lie. The customer […]
Read more →7 Corporate Culture Sins Destroying Your Organisation
An 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 mirrored virtue. Not as moral […]
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Toxic Ownership Models: How Corporate Culture Fails 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 merely a structural choice, and […]
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Technology Leadership Assessment for Business Heads
This is an assessment exists to surface how you actually think about leadership of technologists. Answer honestly. Not as the executive you present in interviews. As the leader you become when the deadline is real, the team is pushing back, and someone senior is asking you for certainty you do not have. Every option is […]
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AI First Mover Finality: Why Reaction Becomes Impossible
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 weapon travelling at the speed […]
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Sinking Car Syndrome: When Bad Architecture Is Terminal
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 out why a car sank, […]
Read more →The Triplication Paradigm: Why Removing Duplication Fails
Introduction 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 operations duplication rarely yields any benefits […]
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