I've been coding for 40 years. Here are the top 5 things I wish I knew when I started.
1. 90% of the job is debugging and fixing, not creating new code. Which is still fun if you're good at it.
I used to think programming was mostly writing fresh, clever stuff. In reality, most of your time is spent in other people's (or your own past self's) messy code, chasing down why something that "should" work doesn't. Get really good at debugging early. Learn assembly reading, call stacks, and kernel debuggers. It pays off hugely. The best engineers I saw were absolute magicians at this.
2. Manage complexity from day one (ie: don't write slop and "fix it later" if it goes somewhere).
Very early on, I'd hammer out code and refactor afterward. Big mistake. Now I start with clean, skeletal structure (minimalism first) and flesh it out carefully, with AI or not.
Messy code compounds and becomes unfixable. Upfront discipline on architecture, naming, and simplicity saves enormous pain later, especially in large systems like Windows.
3. Tools and processes matter more than you think
We suffered with basic diff/manual deltas instead of modern source control like Git. Branching, testing, and good tooling would have made porting and collaboration way smoother. Invest in your environment, automation, and reproducible builds early. Good tools amplify your output; bad ones (or none) drag everything down.
4. Understand the problem and existing code deeply before writing
Don't jump straight to coding. Map out the problem, study what's already there (you'll inherit a lot), and plan. Low-level knowledge (hardware quirks, alignment issues on different architectures like MIPS/Alpha) was crucial. Also: assert early and often. It forces clarity.
5. People, politics, and "the right tool for the job" beat pure tech arguments.
Brilliant engineers still argue endlessly. Sometimes it's about ego, not merit. Learn to spot the difference and "steer" the conversation rather than "winning" it.
Bonus from experience: Side projects like Task Manager (started at home because I wanted the tool) can become your biggest hits. Ship small, useful things often. If you're just starting, focus on fundamentals, patterns over syntax, and building resilience for the long haul. It's going to be a wild ride, but the fundamentals still matter.
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"Disparate Impact," the legal doctrine that stipulates outcomes between blacks and whites must be the same, was codified into law by the 1991 Civil Rights Act.
That doctrine has destroyed the schools and the colleges and the police. It very nearly destroyed financial system when mortgages were awarded on the basis of racial quotas.
And, as of this writing, it remains the operating doctrine of every major public American institution.
It has not been repealed. It has been mildly rolled back in some domains — the Supreme Court ruling in SFFA, the state DEI rollbacks in Texas and Florida, the Trump administration’s executive orders — but it has not been uprooted.
The people who believe in "equity" still staff HR departments, admissions offices, the civil-rights divisions of the federal agencies and the editorial boards of what used to be the newspapers of record.
They will not go quietly. They cannot. Their entire professional identity is built on a doctrine that, if honestly examined, would be repudiated as nothing more than racial Marxism.
So they will fight — inside the universities, inside the corporations, inside the courts, inside the federal bureaucracy, inside the cities they still run — for every inch of the ground the doctrine has captured.
And the fight they will put up is one of the things that makes the coming Fourth Turning particularly dangerous.
A Fourth Turning in which the political class is honest about what it has done — as FDR was honest about abandoning the gold standard, as Hamilton was honest about paying the state debts — can be resolved relatively quickly.
A Fourth Turning in which the political class refuses to admit what caused the crisis and continues to fight for it is what leads to violence. Like during the Civil War of 1861-1865.
And, sadly, I believe it will, once again, lead us into the equivalent of a race-based, low-level civil war. Why? Because there is no reform that fixes this.
There is no tax increase that reverses disparate-impact jurisprudence. There is no interest-rate cut that restores public safety to Baltimore. There is no stimulus that teaches an Oregon high-school graduate to read.
There is no political candidate who can, within the current legal and regulatory framework, restore the premise that individuals are to be judged as individuals and that the standards by which a society measures achievement are not themselves to be abandoned whenever they produce a disparity.
The false doctrine, that individuals are not equal under the law because some people are functionally different than others, is embedded in statute. It is embedded in case law. It is embedded in the professional identity of three generations of administrators. It will not be uprooted by ordinary political means.
It will be uprooted, if it is uprooted at all, by the same process that has uprooted every other entrenched false political doctrine in American history — by a Fourth Turning severe enough to make the doctrine’s defenders surrender ground they would never have surrendered in ordinary politics.
And thus, you must be ready for what will come next.
You cannot, by yourself, fix American public schools. But you can choose your children’s schools. You can homeschool them. You can place them in classical academies or Catholic schools or the small number of charter schools that have kept the older standards.
You cannot, by yourself, fix the violence and mayhem in our cities. But you can own productive land. You can own real assets, directly, that will survive what's coming.
You cannot, by yourself, fix the police. But you can choose where you live, you can choose whom you associate with, and you can prepare your family to defend itself and to help defend your neighbors.
And you cannot, by yourself, fix the disparate-impact doctrine. But you can see it for what it is. You can teach your children to see it. You can refuse to participate in its rituals. You can decline to sign its loyalty oaths.
You can, and this is perhaps the most important thing, tell the truth about it in public, in your own voice.
How? By using the words it refuses to accept.
“Marxism” is one of those words. “Per capita” is another – some groups are prone to violence, prone to ignorance, prone to abandoning their families. Pointing this out isn’t “racist.” It is identifying serious social problems that must be addressed and that cannot fixed by waving the magic wand of "disparate impact" or by an HR rule. "Responsibility” is a third.
The entire racist agenda today is based on the idea that people can’t be responsible for their own lives because of racial oppression that ended more than three generations ago. The antidote to these lies is speaking the truth.
Use these words. Do not flinch when the doctrine’s defenders accuse you of racism or bigotry. They are not interested in your character. They are interested in your silence.
The doctrine has only ever had one real enemy, and it is not a political party or a candidate or a court. Its enemy is the plain speech of a free people.
When free people describe what the doctrine has done — when they name it, in the ordinary language of their communities — the doctrine loses its power. Because its power was never in its arguments. Its power was in its capacity to intimidate people out of naming it.
So, name it.
That is the first political act of a Fourth Turning. Everything else that the country needs to do to get through the next decade — the monetary reset, the fiscal consolidation, the restoration of discipline in the schools, the re-policing of the cities, the rebuilding of standards across the institutions — depends on millions of ordinary Americans recovering the courage to call the thing by its true name.
The true name is Marxism.
The American form of it is disparate impact.
Its consequence, measurable in the statistics of forty years, is the ruin of American institutions.
The doctrine can be defeated. It has been defeated once before — in the Soviet Union, which built a more ambitious form of it at greater cost and collapsed under the weight of the contradictions it could not resolve. Ours is smaller and more refined and better camouflaged, but it is the same doctrine, and in the end it will collapse because of the same contradictions.
The only question — the only question that matters, now — is whether we can name the doctrine and defeat it at the ballot box and in the courts and in the schools, or whether we will have to suffer a violent collapse of society.
However it resolves, you must survive.
The rest of this book is dedicated to helping you and your family survive whatever comes next.
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