Infrastructure Engineering: Systems, Networking, Databases & the Internet
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Network architecture, internet protocols, database and systems design, and the infrastructure engineering decisions that determine whether real production systems hold up under load.
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 →Mac Terminal: Scan TLS Certificates with NMAP and SSLScan
The below script will give you basic information on a websites certificate: NMAP is provides a simple way to get a list of available ciphers from a host website / server. Additionally, nmap provides a strength rating of strong, weak, or unknown for each available cipher. First, download the ssl-enum-ciphers.nse nmap script (explanation here). Then from the same […]
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QUIC: The Protocol That Breaks Your Site Without Warning
Why It Exists, What It Gets Wrong, and How to Diagnose and Fix It Andrew Baker · andrewbaker.ninja · 2 May 2026 1. Why TCP Was a Problem QUIC is a complete replacement for the TCP transport layer. To understand why that replacement was necessary, you need to understand what TCP does internally and where […]
Read more →Monitor Critical DNS Records for Changes Using Batch Script
If you have tier 1 services that are dependant on a few DNS records, then you may want a simple batch job to monitor these dns records for changes or deletion. The script below contains an example list of DNS entries (replace these records for the ones you want to monitor).
Read more →Mac Routing Table: Redirect Website Traffic to en0
This was a hard article to figure out the title for! Put simply, your mac book has a route table and if you want to move a specific IP address or dns from one interface to another, then follow the steps below: First find the IP address of the website that you want to re-route […]
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Why Bank Architecture Determines Resilience More Than Size
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. In a pre-cloud world, this […]
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NTTFB: Net Time to First Byte Explained and Why It Matters
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 when the first byte of […]
Read more →WordPress on AWS Graviton: Deploy & Migrate in Minutes
Running 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, 2GB RAM) at ~$12/month handles […]
Read more →Fix DNS Issues Using dig and whois on Mac OS X
When debugging DNS issues its important to verify the local DNS response with the authoritive DNS nameserver. With dig we can directly query the authoritative name servers for a domain, these are the DNS servers that hold the authoritative records for the domains DNS zone; the source of truth. If a correct response is received […]
Read more →SEO and AEO Page Audit Script: A Technical Guide
Search engines no longer operate alone. Your content is now consumed byGoogle, Bing, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and dozens of otherAI driven systems that crawl the web and extract answers. Classic SEO focuses on ranking. Modern discovery also requires AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) which focuses on being understood and extracted by AI systems. A marketing […]
Read more →Fix FOIT with font-display: swap to Boost Core Web Vitals
Stop 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 sites and fix it in […]
Read more →Browser Curl with Playwright: Load Testing Guide
Modern 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 at the end. What this […]
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