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.