Science & Tech Quote by Wietse Venema

Safety, in Venema's framing, isn't the absence of mistakes; it's what you build when you assume mistakes are inevitable. That single pivot - "even in the presence of bugs" - rejects the comforting myth that careful people produce flawless systems. It smuggles in a worldview shaped by security engineering: attackers don't need you to be incompetent, they just need you to be human.

The line works because it treats "safe" as an architectural property, not a moral one. Bugs become less like personal failures and more like weather: predictable, recurring, and worth designing around. Venema, known for pragmatic, high-stakes tools in security (Postfix, TCP Wrapper), is speaking from domains where software doesn't merely crash; it leaks, escalates privileges, and becomes a weapon. In that context, the challenge isn't polishing code until it's perfect, it's constraining blast radius when it isn't.

Calling it "more interesting" is the quiet flex. It reframes defensive thinking - checks, defaults, least privilege, fail-closed behavior - as creative work rather than bureaucratic drag. There's a subtextual critique of cultures that fetishize velocity and "move fast" bravado: if your system only behaves when everything goes right, you haven't built a system, you've built a demo.

Venema's intent is also pedagogical. He nudges engineers toward humility and toward a more scientific stance: design for adversarial conditions, test for weird edges, assume messy reality. Safety becomes a game of anticipating failure, not denying it.