Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education
Book Three of "Unexpected History"
What if surviving Big Tech’s power imbalance requires the same mindset as surviving a blizzard on Mount Rainier, or resisting indoctrination as a POW? Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education weaves together SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) lessons, software ethics, climbing expeditions, and centuries‑old navigation wisdom to show how you can stay principled, sharp, and intact when the system around you isn’t. Through gripping real‑world stories and hard‑earned insight, this book gives you a practical path to doing what’s right, and helping others do the same.
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Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education blends high‑stakes mountaineering, military SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) lessons, ethical challenges in Big Tech, and the craft of software development into a single, practical framework for navigating power imbalance. Through vivid stories, from POW training to winter ascents of Mount Rainier to the legacy of Nathaniel Bowditch, you learn how to develop judgment, resist disinformation, remain intact under pressure, and grow into a trustworthy practitioner who helps others rise with you. This is a book about skill, ethics, resilience, and mastering your craft through experience, clarity, and courage.
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No Time to Be Beginners
What was it like to stand in the breach, with nobody else to take the decisions, and do-overs are too late? Margaret Hamilton, the first programmer hired for the Apollo project at MIT, explained:
Because software was a mystery, a black box, upper management gave us total freedom and trust. We had to find a way and we did. Looking back, we were the luckiest people in the world; there was no choice but to be pioneers; no time to be beginners.
During the Cold War when it was "nobody but us," our decisions and solutions were shaped by constraints. At Cray Research constraints and barriers pointed us to the best point of leverage. To remain the best in the world, we had no other option. But before considering leverage, we carefully identified and proved relevant capabilities. Those capabilities showed us what solutions might be plausible. We also found that if it wasn't fun, it probably was not worth doing.
This forced way of working, where responsibility could not be abstracted away, has been mostly lost to time.
My Role as Custodian of Lost Skills
I am bringing you those skills because they were never passed to the next generation. I created a primary source document showing what it was like: Nobody but Us: A History of Cray Research's Software and the Building of the World's Fastest Supercomputer. But I wrote a second primary source, reproducing the Cray Research skills for you right now, in 2026. The Wizard's Lens: Learn to Think Like AI is an apprenticeship drawing you in to experience, not merely read about, how we continuously "achieved the impossible" at Cray Research.
Those Cray Research skills did not begin with software, or even hardware. They began outdoors. Experiential education, with real risks and real consequences, has also been abstracted away. That is where judgement is formed. For this I wrote Surviving Spring Break on the Mountain: The Power of Experiential Education.
Pure Entertainment
If it isn't fun, it probably isn't worth doing. I continued practicing the most important debugging skill I know: spotting patterns and connections that others miss. I wrote Unexpected Histories to show you shifted perspectives, purely for entertainment, but showing real history that matters today. In each case, once you see it, you cannot "un-see" it.
Episode 317
An Interview with Edward W. Barnard
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