Robert Roskam
Robert RoskamInternet programming attacks through the ages
80s: hehe...I pretended to be Bob on IRC
90s: 1k people went to my website at once and the server caught on fire
00s: PHP/ActiveX/Flash - we make tech that's basically designed to be hacked
10s: one of these 10k nodejs dependencies got hijacked, glhf figuring out which one
20s: the LLM got prompted-injected via emojis
Robert RoskamHofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
This law captures the fundamental difficulty of software estimation. Even when we know we're bad at estimating, we're still bad at estimating.
- The discovered work emerges because...well, you "discovered" it
- Scope creep happens gradually
- Integration takes longer than expected
The solution isn't better estimation; it's shorter feedback loops.