Category: Networking + Technology + Internet
XZ Utils Backdoor: How One Engineer Saved the Internet
On a quiet Friday evening in late March 2024, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund was running some routine benchmarks on his Debian development box when he noticed something strange. SSH logins were taking about 500 milliseconds longer than they should have. Failed login attempts from automated bots were chewing through an unusual amount of […]
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 →What Is Minification and How to Test If It Works
1. 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 human readability might look like […]
Read more →Fix Render-Blocking JavaScript in WordPress: 3-Step Guide
If 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 to fix it without either […]
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Why Core Banking Architecture Has Always Been Flawed
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 birth to, the one that […]
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CloudScale SEO AI Optimiser: Free WordPress SEO Plugin
Written by Andrew Baker | February 2026 Download the plugin here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/cloudscale-seo-ai-optimizer/ S3 download (updated frequently): https://andrewninjawordpress.s3.af-south-1.amazonaws.com/cloudscale-seo-ai-optimizer.zip 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 […]
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How a Blog Post Wiped $30 Billion from IBM in One Day
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 years of stock resilience gone […]
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Cloudflare Free Tier Review: Why It Works for Enterprise
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 anyone has figured out the […]
Read more →Technology Leadership Competence: Self-Assessment Guide
A 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 situation. Select one answer per […]
Read more →Auto-Recover a Failed WordPress Instance on AWS
When 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 full instance reboot. Step 1: […]
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