
# Hello world, welcome to my new blog.

It's been over a decade since I put up a simple sandwich board website. Over the years it accumulated a few decorations, but ultimately it's remained simple
becuase I didn't want to show people the shell of an empty website I forgot about. There's nothing worse than an engaging and interesting blog that abruptly ends five years ago. I think over
the years I became so afraid of this appearance that I let it stop me from writing, from expressing my ideas. Being worried about the reaction to your work can be overpowering and terrifying.
On my website though, I have a solution. I control it 100%. I don't need to enable comments, or even provide contact information.

This is my new webiste. I'm goint to try to post as much as I can but there's really no guarantees. That's life. I need to stop being afraid of being the dead ghost blog and just write as much as I can.

I trust that my vibe will attract the tribe required. The honey will undoubtedly bring in a few haters who enjoy the flavor but still find a way to be negative. They are not bad people, they are hurt, misunderstood
or traumatized folks who just never got the love and attention they desreved. I trust in my awesomeness and I'm tired of letting the judgement of others prevent me from being my true authentic self.

Hello, world, welcome to the new blog.


Mat Gilbert

A new website, a new look, and a new effort on writing and sharing thoughts.

Hello World


# What is reverse bushwhacking?

Sometimes when you are forging an unforgiving or unmanageable trail, you need to recognize that the path has become too difficult and you just have to turn around. There is no other option.

Early in my career I felt the warm, tender embrace not from Microsoft products, but from the ol' reliable LAMP stack. AWS was the hot new thing after transitioning away from VPS / shared hosting.

The exhileration of my own boxes, to do as I wanted! The terror of knowing you could rack up bills, but more than anything I just enjoyed the flexability and options at the time.

Also NONE of it was ever Microsoft. In theory I think it was possible to run MSSQL in the cloud, but that's beyond the point. The early experiences in my career of running PHP on IIS were distant nightmares in the rearview mirror and life was good.

Till it wasn't. I had a great run in the NY / NJ tri-state area, but once I moved to Vermont I arrived in the technical desert. There's a lot of embedded Microsoft in the state, a lot of folks holding on to REALLY old software they don't even have a good rationale for using. Old clunky CMS systems that are only popular in New Zealand for instance... I digress.

I've spent a significant portion of my career literally or figuratively running away from Microsoft and I just... I can't anymore. It's not that I've finally fallen prey to the siren song of Steve... though his rhythmic chants are compelling. DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!

I have a really good job opportunity that has asserted itself in my life. It's not the path I chose, in fact I was trying to get off Mr. Toad's wild ride when things took an unexpected turn and I effectively was given a do-over.

Rarely in life do you get meaningful, clean-slate do-overs. I don't want to waste this. It's ok to go backwards a little bit even if it seems like reverse progress.

So all that time I spent running from Microsoft is over... sort of. My linux experience isn't going away, and my preference towards open source tools naturally drives me away from the MS "enterprise" ecosystem. Unfortounately for me, Satya Nadella has done a good job and the realities of 2024 are that Azure is a reasonable place to host just about any infrastructure.

Here's to open eyes to both old and new trails, and a willingness to color in shades of blue. We'll give it a go, let's see where the winds take us.

After over a decade of avoiding Microsoft, a new challenge appears

Reverse Bushwacking


One of the things I was worried most about when I created this blog was the idea that I'd start it up and forget about it. There's nothing I hate more than an abandoned blog. So what did I do? Exactly what I was worried about. Obviously. Classic target fixation.

What am I stuck on? Well mostly the verticaltubejig.com website. Also the drawing robot too, but the most pressing thing at the moment is the lure website. I can't do everything at once, the only thing I really can do is focus on one thing at a time until I see the needle move.

I have fallen really hard into a perfectionism about the photos of the lures. To me, I feel like I can drive more engagement and loiter time on my site with good images, as well as the templates built in social sharing icons. The natural human tendency of "hey look at that!" is something I hope to use to my advantage.

One of the counter-intuitive solutions to this anxiety is compassion, not anger. Instead of being angry at myself for falling short of my unrealistic goals, I'm trying a new thing where I give myself a break. I am understanding of the reasons around not making things work correctly.

It's really hard to take good pictures of shiny lures. I've made some good progress though, I have a small lightbox and enough can lights to shake a stick at. I have a rat nest of power strips that looks straight out of christmast story. It's so close. All I want are nice crisp photos of lures that are on a white background. The aesthetic will be worth it, I keep telling myself.

I started writing this yesterday but I got distracted. I just ticked the date up one, and I'm back now to finish it. I have compassion for the fact that it happened. It's not ideal. It's not what I want. It is better than the dead, abandoned blog that this was becoming though. I don't have to update every day, but I do have to update.

More to come on the lure website soon. Pictures are so close. One thing at a time till the needle moves.


Goals and dreams persist but the obstacles continue to manifest. I'm not special it's just life.

Stuck again


I took another one of my favorite things, and tried to turn it into a monetizable project.

The keyword here is tried, and I want to correct myself realtime and emphasize that it has to be I am trying, not I tried.

It's easy to sit down and find joy and creativity in making unique and creative art pieces. It's really hard to force myself to make 30 of them, multiple sets of a particular pattern to go with the corresponding lures.

It's like I'm taking the natural progression of videogame customization to my fishing lures, I am providing premium visual assets to those with a taste and budget for the finer things in life.

For the past few weeks I have been able to find energy to edit video, but not to go tie hooks. I have a few sets I need to make and I've only worked through one. They are not difficult to make, the problem is that it's really difficult to make time for them.

Finding time to prioritize my business that I want to succeed so badly is too difficult? I feel a lot of guilt, shame and self-resentment around my inability to size this incredible opportunity.

Realistically I am jugging a lot of things right now. Instead of focusing on my lure business I'm also working to resurrect another side project while I have help from someone else to keep it pointed in the right direction. It's a confluence of two important factors: someone who can help, and space to lay out the work in full to minimize context switching. Having a dedicated space to work with purpose is very effective so far.

I think the real problem is that tying these hooks is something I enjoy, and I find it difficult to enjoy things like this when things outside of my control are making my life difficult.

It's hard to make art in a foxhole. Finding meaningful work is what makes me psychologically feel like I am in a warzone. The metaphor is strained but the PTSD I have from unprofressional experiences at work is real. I've never been shot at but then again most people aren't on the ND spectrum so we are in a way both up against often unseen and dangerous threats.

I am trying really, really hard to stay focused each day, but something new comes up and the ability to stay focused matters less than attending to the current crisis. I want to be diligent, I really do.

I have to get the thorn out of my paw or I can never run, hunt or survive. There is no amount of "dealing with it" that I can muster up that will cause the very real injury to heal without addressing the root cause.

Until some sort of mireacle happens where I achieve more time and mental clarity to work on the projects that matter to me, things will be slow but steady. Sometimes sputtering and chaotic, but always forward.

I want the lure thing to work, I want the robot drawing thing to work, and I want VT2U to become something more than just me kayak fishing alone. The collab episodes give me hope for the future that not only can I be tolerated, but I can be enjoyed and celebrated.

I need to go tie some hooks and get some rest. I need to tie hooks tomorrow and the day after that till the batches are done. I need to get this done ASAP and get the store up yesterday. I feel a sense of urgency that outstrips any reasonable capacity I have to deliver. I feel like I'm never going to  be able to make it happen and the pressure of that is really unbearable at times.

I need to be compassionate for myself or I will never get these things done.

I need to go tie some hooks and get some rest.

Turning a passion project into a business is fraught with danger and failure, yet we do it anyway.

Scaling is Hard


# Complexity comes at a cost, and for me the AWS juice is no longer worth the squeeze.

In 2010 or so, I was working at a small company that had it's important web apps on private VPS hosting.

At the time AWS was the new hotness, so I fired up an EC2 instance, started dabbling with RDS and before long I had a delicious cloud soup brewin'.

It's been a flexible and useful platform over the years, but ultimately I've found that for me personally it's way overkill. It's using a landmine instead of a mousetrap, and the destruction (cost) it leaves behind is no longer worth it.

Back in the day VPS providers were the challenge, or even worse being on shared hosting where you didn't have any control over the environment. Install an apache module? Ha, you have no power here!

And then I got hit with the JAM. JAMStack really changed the trajectory of my career, though I've come to realize that this term is loaded and was a bit of a marketing tool by Netlify. I really fell in love with Next.js, and the architecture of how it works has in my my mind replaced the need for things like WordPress and Drupal. It's not that these are bad tools per se, but the old model of database driven CMS sytems has been superceded by the javascript and markup driven static platforms.

They are easier to host, they are easier to work on, and the nature of the companies that provide ecosystems for them (Netlify, Vercel) are in the business of making your website FAST. Why spend time piping the output of some elaborate Terraform process into a CDN when you can just hook a repo up to Vercel and just go. CI/CD and feature branches out of the box.

Why was I maintaining the AWS infrastructure for so long?

A website I hosted for a friend. He and I lived together many moons ago and I helped him put together a small website for a book and story he created. He actually got an e-book published on Amazon for it, and I hacked up a little WordPress instance for hosting his content.

I spent probbably thousands of dollars in hosting, and countless time and energy spent avoiding this problem all because I felt bad I didn't have the time to save this relic of the past. I have backups of the filesystem and database but the real problem is I just don't want to deal with WordPress, or any of that ball of mud any time soon.

There are new tools that are less complicated than AWS is, because new patterns and toolsets have emerged. Modern web development complexity has bloomed to an insane level, and it's time for developers to take the wheel back from Jesus and steer towards more reasonable tooling that mere mortals can afford.

I'm turning off AWS because the type of businesses it attracts are not the kinds I want to work with. It's not about the platform, it's about the types of cultures that choose this platform and how they treat their employees, vendors and customers.

AWS isn't a bad platform (probbably the gold standard actually) and the people who work with it and on it are not inherantly bad people. Except for Jeff. Cultures that embrace AWS expect a wide range of understanding of an ever evolving list of products that I frankly cannot keep up with anymore. In my experience they have been less willing to "show you the way" and expect to throw a link of documentation at you and just be done with it.

I have emotional, technical, and philosophical reasons for leaving AWS behind. Mostly there are just better tools out there, simpler, more effective solutions. I don't care if these solutions themselves run on AWS, that's not my problem.

I want tools made for me, and I found some awesome ones.

Time to clean up some old messes.

Bye, AWS 👋

 Complexity comes at a cost, and for me the AWS juice is no longer worth the squeeze

Bye Bye AWS 👋


# I'm quitting reddit.

Or at least I'm trying to.

One of the biggest mental health challenges I've faced in my professional career has been a sense of demand avoidance and procrastination. One of my biggest sources of procrastination and doom scrolling has been reddit. It's easy to look at this from a "he doesn't care / won't work" perspective but the large issue is that I retreat and retract from social situations that I feel aren't giving me the chance for success. Reddit isn't the problem, but my use of it as an escape is an actionable symptom I can do something about.

My choices to quit are twofold. One, I feel like being a shitty person needs to become a bad business model. The only way I can voice my opinion on the protests is to not use the platform that I've enjoyed for the past decade. It's a bitter pill to swallow, and one I'm honestly having trouble following through on. Spez if you're reading this you can eat shit, I'm upset that you have poisoned the platform I contributed to for over a decade. You're not going anywhere, so I'm out. I regret contributing what I did, but (so far) I haven't decided to delete my content and posts. Like the subtitle said, it's been proving harder than anticipated.

My second, and more important reason to quit reddit is to take control of my life, and put my time and effort into things that are reciprocally beneficial. One of the observations I made during the reddit protests was that I spent a lot of time commenting, sometimes engaging in troll / flame wars but never really actually CONNECTING with people. I posted, I relished my upvotes but what did they even represent? What's the point of impressing people you will never interact with if all it does is enrich a business?

Over a year ago I gave up alcohol because I was using it as a crutch to cope with unsustainable and unhealthy life and social conditions. Conditions like jobs you just "can't leave" and then... you get let go and you can't even get the jobs that you would turn your nose up at. Being put in prolonged situations where my values are not respected has reseulted in some pretty severe anxiety and demand avoidance around things that I don't want to do, or don't think will work out.

If the repeated exposure to unescapable stress sounds like PTSD, well it probbably is. I do not have a formal diagnosis but working with my therapist has opened my eyes to my avoidance behaviors. Regardless of the lables attached to them, they are all things that I can work to either improve myself on, or find ways to remove myself from situations before things become unteneable again.

The thing that is craziest to me about alcohol is that it was actually very easy to quit. I did it cold turkey, I just stopped spending money on it, which was easy in part because part of my stress was about not having money to begin with. I also had motivation to quit drinking because I felt (rightly so) that I would lose everything from my wife to my house if I didn't make a significant change.

Quitting alcohol was also helped by friends and family who supported me, and were just there socially for me. Who didn't make it weird when I didn't want any booze. I did lose friends because of this change, I think this is one of the things people fear most about drinking and it's worth noting. It's a real thing. You're going to have to make sacrifices like this that don't feel good if you want to improve your life.

Anyway back to the subject at hand. I go on at length about alcohol because it was another crutch in my elaborate support structure made almost entirely of maladaptive behaviors. Alcohol was identified as a problem, and successfully removed. I haven't had a drink in over a year. Mission accomplished. So quitting a social media site should be easy, right?

Actually, no. Even though I have tried to quit I've been unable to truly avoid reddit. Just like TikTok it's just become a facet of society that is blasted at you whether you want it or not. Ignoring reddit at times means ignoring people whom I care about that send me information via reddit. I'm going to read it, I resepect and enjoy them and my beef with the platform doesn't justify cutting off my ACTUAL social network.

I'm writing this post because I just want to give myself some compassion about quitting reddit being difficult. I find myself returning to view political news, which is another poisonus cycle I want to end. The other day I found myself responding to a thread on a new jersey devils subreddit, which again... these are things I miss doing. But I have to make myself question whether the actions I'm doing are actually benefiting me or if I'm just going through the motions.

Being real for a moment, I've just kind of replaced reddit with Facebook. The main difference is that the activity I'm putting into facebeook is actually prodcuctive from a networking and talking to people perspective. It's opened a few doors for me and in that I can honestly say even though it's a lesser evil, I am getting something about it that reddit wasn't giving me.

The other piece of this puzzle is YouTube and our VT2U channel, which has been an incredibly fulfilling project in terms of telling a story I want to. It has allowed me to present myself to the world in a way that I not only approve of, but I'm proud of. Instead of just lurking on the edges and commenting, I've become an active contributor. Not even anything special, just being myself. My vibe has attracted a tribe, and by putting myself out there and showing the real me I have opened the door to real and meaningful connections in ways that reddit never did. Shout out to Hunter at Saratoga Bass Fishing and Matt from BareFishin, you guys have singlehandedly restored my faith in humanity. All you did was be yourselves, I can't thank you enough for being YOU, and accepting me for me.

Reddit doesn't serve the thing it used to for me in my life, and I have to take many, many steps backwards to truly replace the gaping hole that it's left in my life. It helped to turbocharge my tech career after college. Like Napster, ICQ, AIM and the Gamespy Forums I was part of, they are times and places to enjoy and reflect on. Not something that could last forever.

My choice is that rather than participating in platforms, I need to build my own. Instead of joining teams or clubs, I need to be the leader and organizer that I can be to create the meetups, events and communities that I want to be a part of. Whether it's facebook or YouTube I've found a way to be more actively engaged. That is the thing I need more of. It's not the platform, it's what you're doing on the platform.

I am ready to be the change that I seek in the world, the first step is leaving behind old and unproductive habits. Reddit helped me become who I am but slowly over time like alcohol did, it became a maladaptive antipattern holding me back. I may never have a drink of alcohol again, but I know soon I will point my browser at old.reddit.com and succum to the FOMO. Quitting reddit is harder than quitting alcohol for me and that's ok. In the larger picture of harm reduction I'm making positive steps every time I choose to edit video or plan a trip with a friend over scrolling through pictures or arguing with meat or bots online.

I hope this post gives you the willingness to look at your own feelings, thoughts and actions with an honest, open and critical eye. It's not about being hard on yourself it's about being honest, and embracing the feelings even when they are uncomfortable.

This is where the true growth is.

I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find that on reddit.

I'm trying to change my habits and routines to be happier and more productive. It's proving to be very difficult.

On Quitting Reddit


# Today my new website is live.

It feels kind of like the photo above.

It doesn't look grand, there isn't a huge amount of stuff to it yet but it's all the things I need.

The river isn't ok, but at least it's flowing and that means it's time to get to work.

It's a next.js template I bought, trimmed and styled to my liking pepperd with some personal photos.

It's "craigslist ugly" as some might say but I'm calling it minimalism with a purpose: "Telling a story".

The UI is here to do one thing, get you to the content I told you about. Whether it's chatting with me
at a bar or giving a talk at some sort of conference, I want to make sure that when I tell people to
"check it out on my website" the process is as easy as can be.

This means no extra crap to get in the way. No unnecessary design, and the only trappings of social media
share stuff are just extras from my pre-made template that I choose to leave because realistically, I'm
shooting myself in the foot by removing them.

As long as its aesthetically pleasing and clean, for me that's the real test.

My new website is live and I'm excited at the possibilities.

Publishing a new version of the website. Going live. Moving forward.

matgilbert.com

Reverse Bushwacking

Stuck again

Scaling is Hard

Bye Bye AWS 👋

On Quitting Reddit

Website Relaunch

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