- Technology Blog Posts

How my free WordPress backup and restore plugin handles a 3 GB site every night, sends each backup to five places at once, keeps a standby rebuilding itself, and rolls back a bad plugin update before anyone notices.

A free, open source menu bar app that tells you in plain English why your Mac is slow, hot, full or flat, and fixes it with a click.

A practical look at endpoint detection and response on Linux servers, containers and Kubernetes, and why the decision should start with the workload and its residual risk rather than a uniform coverage target. 1.

By Andrew Baker, CIO at Capitec Bank In June I argued that Cloudflare had missed its market, and that the Internet needs a trust layer rather than another security tool.

Ask a bank how it manages the risk of depending on a single cloud provider and you’ll usually hear “we’re adding a second one”.

A follow up to The ARM That Grew Teeth, four months on Early this morning a Masters student in electrical engineering in Taipei, Matthew Exon, posted a short note on the fediverse that has been rattling around in my head all day.

There is a small interview question I like because it starts with something that looks like a typo and ends up taking you through language semantics, integer promotion, the Java Memory Model, x86 versus ARM, store buffers and finally how to write a counter

This is a companion to Decoys as Zero Day Sensors: Deception, Isolation and Early Signal, which argued that decoys are good at exposing unknown exploits because they have no legitimate business purpose.

Why public conversations about leadership, culture and human imperfection are usually a sign of organisational strength rather than dysfunction, and what an employer’s reaction to them tells you about the place you work. 1.

Why senior leaders who save their difficult conversations for their resignation are failing the very organisations they were trusted to lead, and why the leaders receiving those resignations need to look in the mirror too. 1.

For most of S3’s life, the honest answer to “can I just mount a bucket and point my application at it?”

Many of the scams that hurt our clients don’t begin with an attack on our systems; they begin with a message.

I recently saw an advert suggesting that approving an AI budget without ROI metrics was the equivalent of driving blind.

For the better part of two decades, almost every large organisation I have worked in or alongside followed the same ritual, and we followed it so faithfully that very few people stopped to ask whether it was still serving anyone.

In my earlier article on harshness and firmness in leadership, I argued that you can hold people accountable without being cruel to them.

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Someone sent me a reel this morning, a clip from Lewis Howes, and it stopped me.

A root cause analysis exists to tell an organisation what it needs to fix, and yet a surprising number of the RCAs I have read over the years tell us something far less useful, which is what happened in the few minutes before a service fell over.

For most of my career, the person most likely to break my code was somebody else.

Most technical blogs treat code as an afterthought, pasting a block of monospaced text into a post, perhaps adding a screenshot of an IDE, and leaving the reader to guess which version of the repository it came from, whether it still compiles, and how it…

I should apologise up front for the length of this article.

A model that can only answer from a menu you wrote cannot invent a number, but it can still pick the wrong item on the menu with great conviction, and the difference between those two failures is the whole story.

Picture a business process that reaches the point where a customer must approve something important, where the intended control is an approval through their banking app, but the app has not yet been activated.

Claude Code has no native pauseless compaction mode: its own /compact, and the automatic compaction it runs as a conversation approaches the end of the context window, both stop the session while the summary is written.

Most of the security stack we buy is built to recognise things that have already been seen somewhere else, which is exactly why it struggles with zero days: a signature cannot exist for an exploit nobody has catalogued, a patch cannot exist for a flaw the…

Why loving firmness works better than harshness at work, and why harsh organisations slowly go blind 1.

Java 27 went GA on 15 September 2026 with nine JEPs, and if you skim the release notes you’d be forgiven for shrugging.

September 18, 2026 · Andrew Baker 1.

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Spotify’s engineering blog published a piece in September 2026 with a title designed to stop a platform engineer mid scroll: “Portal by Spotify cut my Claude Code token usage by 90%”.

The problem is often not what was said.

If AI Means You No Longer Hire Juniors, You Are Doing AI Wrong I recently read TechCentral’s article, “South African tech juniors squeezed as AI reshapes hiring.”

I spent twenty minutes last week watching a frontier AI assistant invent a fact about me, invent a citation to support that fact, confess under pressure that it had invented both, and then, one message later, do the same thing again in the opposite direct…

For most of the history of software, code was expensive.

Most AWS accounts accumulate risk quietly.

There is an asymmetry sitting in plain sight in every retail lending book, and once you notice it you cannot unsee it.

By Andrew Baker · Group CIO, Capitec Bank SQL Server 2025 quietly closed several of the holes that made Resource Governor unusable as a containment layer, and the one objection everybody repeats, that its classification is spoofable, turns out to be an ar…

Every bank of any size runs on funds transfer pricing, and every bank of any size will tell you, if you catch someone honest in a quiet moment, that FTP is also quietly poisoning the organisation.

The friction in using Claude Code has never really been the tool itself, it is the ceremony that surrounds starting it, because you have to open a terminal, remember where the project actually lives, change into that directory, type the command, and then…

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Why the hardest system I have ever tried to upgrade is myself Over the past three years I have been getting a lot of help with something far more important than technology: how to be a better dad and a better husband.

One of the easiest ways for a large organization to become bloated is to confuse an approved budget with an obligation to spend it.

Anthropic and OpenAI have converged on the same number.

A production incident that shows up again and again has the same shape.

One of the more expensive mistakes I have watched organizations make, again and again, is assuming that anything worth building must automatically be a product, and that assumption alone has spawned more unnecessary teams, more artificial ownership struct…