Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

Software, in Venema's telling, begins with an admission of guilt. Not moral guilt, but engineering guilt: the certainty that failure is not an edge case but a scheduled appointment. Coming from a scientist known for security work, the line reads less like pessimism than a survival tactic. It refuses the startup myth that code is a clean expression of will; instead it treats software as a living system embedded in messy ecosystems of hardware quirks, user behavior, shifting requirements, hostile actors, and plain entropy.

The craft move here is the double attribution: "my own mistake" sits beside "some other cause". That pairing collapses the comforting boundary between bug and accident. It implies that even when you do everything "right", reality still gets a vote. In security, that "other cause" is doing a lot of work: unexpected inputs, undocumented dependencies, time-of-check/time-of-use races, supply-chain compromise. The quote smuggles in a worldview where control is partial and humility is a prerequisite for competence.

There's also an ethical subtext. If you start from "it will fail", you design differently: you log, you test adversarially, you handle errors explicitly, you limit blast radius, you assume users will do surprising things and attackers will do worse. Venema isn't romanticizing failure; he's naming it early so it can be managed late. The intent is to swap ego for rigor, and optimism for responsibility: a quiet manifesto for defensive engineering in a culture that still loves heroic debugging more than unglamorous resilience.