Good Code Isn't Secure Code—And That's Not Up for Debate

Let me say this as plainly as possible:

You can write the cleanest code on your team.
You can pass every test, meet every spec, and dazzle the board with your product velocity.
But if you’re not thinking like an attacker?
Well Well Well.

I’ve sat in rooms where software engineers were celebrated for hitting sprint goals, while API logs quietly showed attackers poking around sensitive endpoints—undetected.

Why?

Because somewhere along the way, we equated good engineering with secure engineering.
That’s a dangerous assumption.
And I don’t make dangerous assumptions.

Let’s Be Clear

"Good code" is optimized for clarity, reuse, and maintainability.
"Secure code" is optimized for resilience under pressure.

These are not the same skill sets.
They should be married. But in most orgs, they’re not even dating.

Here’s What I See Too Often:

• A team proudly shipping a public-facing API with no authorization logic on object-level access.

• Tokens handed out with full admin scopes because they say to themselves “we’ll restrict them later.”

• Shadow APIs spun up in staging that quietly make it into production, unmonitored, undocumented, and fully exposed.

• Developers who genuinely believe “our code passed QA, so it’s secure.”
  (I love developers. I was one. But let’s be real—QA isn’t red teaming.)

So What’s the Move?

If you’re leading teams, building platforms, or overseeing product security, here’s the standard I challenge you to uphold:

1. Don’t assume clean code is safe code.
   If it hasn’t been tested against abuse cases, it’s not ready.

2. Inventory is your foundation.
   If you don’t know what APIs you have, neither does your security team. But trust me—someone else does. Trust me!

3. Security is a posture.
   Shift it left, embed it in your pipelines, and don’t ship without sign-off from someone whose entire job is to think like a threat actor.

4. Elegance matters. But protection matters more.
   Code that’s hard to exploit is more valuable than code that’s easy to read. I’m ready to defend this anywhere!

Rounding up

Readable code is great.
But code that can’t be exploited?
That’s what keeps companies alive.

I’ve worked with teams who learned this the hard way—
after breaches, breakdowns, and blindsides.
And I’ve helped them build back stronger.

Because the real win is building things that withstand.

If your team is ready to elevate your API security from “we think it’s fine” to bulletproof by design (Whoosh…I came up with that), let’s make it happen.

👉 Book a free consultation with me here.
👉 Follow me on LinkedIn to stay up-to-date with the latest in API security.

See you in the next one. 🔥

Talk soon,
Damilola

P.S. I’ve been working on something special behind the scenes—something I believe you’ll find genuinely valuable. It’s almost ready, and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you soon. Any guesses?