"In a previous life I wrote the software that controlled my physics experiments. That software had to deal with all kinds of possible failures in equipment. That is probably where I learned to rely on multiple safety nets inside and around my systems"
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The line reads like a quiet origin story for a very particular kind of paranoia: the productive kind. Venema isn’t romanticizing “failures” as character-building; he’s pointing to a hard-earned, lab-bench truth that systems fail in boring, stubborn, and often simultaneous ways. In a physics experiment, a glitch isn’t an abstract inconvenience. It’s lost time, broken equipment, corrupted data, sometimes real physical risk. When your code is the nervous system of a machine, you stop believing in single points of assurance.
The subtext is a critique of the default engineering fantasy: that one well-designed safeguard, one “robust” component, can carry the moral weight of reliability. Venema’s phrasing - “all kinds of possible failures” - signals an empirical mindset shaped by exposure to messy reality, not clean diagrams. He’s describing a worldview where you assume the unexpected, then design as if you’ll be wrong about which failure arrives first.
Context matters because Venema’s later reputation in computer security (where adversaries replace “equipment failure” with “human ingenuity”) makes this lineage feel inevitable. The lab teaches you that inputs lie, sensors drift, cables loosen, and humans forget. Security teaches you that those same fragilities become attack surfaces. “Multiple safety nets inside and around my systems” is more than redundancy; it’s layered thinking: fail-safe defaults, compartmentalization, independent checks, recovery paths.
The intent, then, is not nostalgia. It’s a statement of engineering ethics: trust is earned through overlap, not confidence, and resilience is something you build around the assumption that the world will not cooperate.
The subtext is a critique of the default engineering fantasy: that one well-designed safeguard, one “robust” component, can carry the moral weight of reliability. Venema’s phrasing - “all kinds of possible failures” - signals an empirical mindset shaped by exposure to messy reality, not clean diagrams. He’s describing a worldview where you assume the unexpected, then design as if you’ll be wrong about which failure arrives first.
Context matters because Venema’s later reputation in computer security (where adversaries replace “equipment failure” with “human ingenuity”) makes this lineage feel inevitable. The lab teaches you that inputs lie, sensors drift, cables loosen, and humans forget. Security teaches you that those same fragilities become attack surfaces. “Multiple safety nets inside and around my systems” is more than redundancy; it’s layered thinking: fail-safe defaults, compartmentalization, independent checks, recovery paths.
The intent, then, is not nostalgia. It’s a statement of engineering ethics: trust is earned through overlap, not confidence, and resilience is something you build around the assumption that the world will not cooperate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coding & Programming |
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