Andrew Baker's Technology Blog Posts
CIO · Capitec Bank · South Africa

Hard opinions.
Real scale.
No fluff.

I'm Andrew Baker — Group CIO at Capitec Bank. I write about engineering leadership, AWS architecture, database performance, and banking technology. The kind of problems you only understand after you've broken them at scale.

Read the Blog Explore Topics
214+
Technical posts published
3+
Continents broken at scale
AWS · ABSA
Barclays
Where the scar tissue came from
What I write about

Six pillars.
One rule: depth.

No recycled hot takes. Every post is written by someone who has shipped the thing, scaled it, and cleaned up the mess.

01

Engineering Leadership & Culture

Why your best engineers leave, how bad org structures quietly destroy teams, and what separates engineering leaders who scale from those who stall.

02

AWS, Cloud & Database Architecture

Banking-grade AWS deployments, multi-cloud trade-offs, and database design at scale. The architectural decisions that prevent 3am incidents.

03

Networking & Infrastructure

Network architecture, internet infrastructure, and the foundational technology decisions that determine whether your systems hold up under real-world load.

04

Open Source & Developer Tooling

Open source software that powers real production systems, and the macOS tooling that keeps high-output engineering teams productive.

05

Banking Technology & Cyber Security

Fraud systems, banking malware, attack surfaces, and what building secure financial technology looks like inside one of Africa's largest retail banks.

06

Artificial Intelligence

AI in banking, LLMs in production, AI search optimisation, and what actually changes when you deploy AI onto real infrastructure at scale.

About

The scar tissue
is the credential.

I'm the Group CIO at Capitec Bank, one of South Africa's largest retail banks. Before that I ran technology at ABSA Group, built algorithmic trading systems at Barclays Capital, and spent time at AWS.

This blog is where I write what I actually think. Opinionated, technical, and occasionally uncomfortable for people who prefer consensus over correctness.

Group CIO — Capitec Bank
Former CTO — ABSA Group
Algo Trading Systems — Barclays Capital
Director of Engineering EC2 — AWS
Writing

All posts.

Top Posts
19 Deep Dive: Pauseless Garbage Collection in Java 25
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21 Finding and Setting the Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU) on Mac/OSX
24 May 2023 👁 181 views
22 Redis vs Valkey: A Deep Dive for Enterprise Architects
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The Problem: macOS Will Delete Your Local Files Screenshot If you try to disable iCloud Drive syncing for…

01 Jan 2026 👁 153 views
24 I Have Two Outlooks and Neither One Is Working: The Enterprise Software Complexity Trap
05 Apr 2026 👁 142 views

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214+ posts on engineering leadership, AWS, databases, and banking technology — written by someone who's shipped at scale.

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