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You can use this page to email Edward W. Barnard about Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education.
About the Book
I learned Experiential Education directly from World War II veteran and mountaineer Willi Unsoeld, a leading founder of that philosophy. We'll see his hilarious tryout for the first U.S. expedition to the top of Mount Everest. Then I’m bringing you to our own winter summit of Mount Rainier, a feat as rare today as it was back then.
That sounds weird as a companion book to developing a software career. Unsoeld’s wife Jolene placed this in perspective for me decades later: It’s learning to experience the journey that makes it special, that creates a career, that surfaces the joy amongst the dragons. Success only comes with planning and serious preparation; only experience brings mastery of the craft. That lesson remains the same whether it’s on a mountain or in front of a keyboard or whiteboard.
About the Author
Edward W. Barnard brings unique implementation expertise from programming Cray supercomputers at the hardware level, debugging systems at classified facilities, and solving critical Y2K infrastructure problems. His 20+ years at Cray Research included hands-on work with assembly language, operating systems, and I/O subsystems. He has published over 100 technical articles, helping developers implement solutions to complex problems. His cross-domain experience, from NSA troubleshooting to Saudi Aramco installations, provides practical insights into applying advanced problem-solving techniques across diverse technical environments.
Edward has transferred his skill of bare-metal programming the Cray I/O Subsystem (with only 131,072 bytes of local memory) to novel ways of managing Large Language Model token context windows, unlocking capabilities not yet taught in AI literature. When a skill dormant for 35 years becomes suddenly relevant again, he calls this The Time Travel Pattern.