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“I went from negative to positive.” - Biggie Smalls, BedStuy Motivational Speaker That came up near the end of my conversation with Cameron on The Defender’s Journal, and it probably says more about my career than any title ever has.

I started in factory work, DJing, and ThinkPad tech support. I somehow ended up working on security, software, and systems at global scale. Over a long enough story arc, I’m not sure any of the “dead ends” were actually dead ends.

* The industry will continue to underestimate fundamentals. We’ll talk about nation-state actors on panels and still get burned by sketchy remote-control software on a work laptop.

* Coding agents are not autocomplete with a better haircut. They are creative, persistent, and occasionally behave like mini red teams. Correctness, provenance, test harnesses, and mutation testing matter more now, not less.

* Mentorship is not doing someone’s job for them. It’s giving enough scaffolding that they can pick up the hard thing themselves.