The central problem, is the enormous jenga tower that we’ve built:

  • Full of dependencies that virtually no one understands.
  • Dependencies generally chosen, for expedience.
  • Chosen by coders at all levels of in/experience.
  • Driven by “ship it now”, and “move fast and break things”.
  • With management rarely caring about risks - until one becomes a public crisis, which can no longer be ignored.

Predictions:

  1. These crises will get both worse, and more frequent - bad actors (*), have noticed how vulnerable everything is.
  • (* Bad actors of all stripes, not “just” in tech - and some have state-level resources.)
  1. Even still, there will be little fundamental change in how we write & deploy code - because most of the people making these decisions haven’t felt it. Yet.
  2. The “powers that be” think they’re insulated from the pain. It may not be long til they find out how wrong they are.