Author Archives: Anthony Mattson

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About Anthony Mattson

If you want to know more, read my About section.

2025, New Year, New Plans

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It’s been a while. Not something I’m particularly happy about, but life doesn’t always go as planned. Our minds also have an amazing ability to complicate our lives, both intentionally and unintentionally. Over the past couple years, I’ve been working on a lot of self-discovery and self-reflections to better understand myself.

With some much needed therapy, I’ve come to better understand how my mind works. Therapy has helped explain why I keep producing all these plans about what I want to do. I start them all but never finish them. Confirmed it isn’t ADHD, but I’ve had complications in my life that have effected my executive functions. TLDR, I love to start new things and overwhelm myself to the point I’m not capable of focusing on anything. Now that I’m working on myself, it’s time to start rethinking my approaches to my own personal development.

So yeah, I have a lot of projects I’d love to work on. I need to start limiting myself and focus on fewer projects/tasks at a time. Seems obvious, but that’s now how my brain wanted to work all this time. With that, I’m going to focus on one professional and one personal goal.

My current professional goal, finally get an AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional certificate. Going to focus on fine tuning my skills to be an AWS Solutions Architect.

My current personal goal, learn Godot and finally start making some video games as a hobby.

Additionally, I will document hurdles I come across while working on these tasks. For example, I will document learning how to setup SSH with GitHub. There is no end of online guides, and I always find myself needing to reference several guides. They all seem to miss something important. Dual intention with this, record the steps for my future reference and share them for other in case it helps. This will be a continuing goal, so it will be a long term goal.

With that, time to get started!

Never Just Copy Code

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When I’m learning something new that involves coding, I’m always grateful when working code examples are provided. Whether I’m working on training modules, looking up how to accomplish a specific task, or troubleshooting code. While I try to learn what I can from reading, I’m much more of a hands-on person and learn best getting my hands dirty, so to speak.

However, I very much understand there are pitfalls for using these code examples. Namely, it is very easy to simply just copy/paste the code and that’s it. If it works, all good. But do you actually know what the code does? If it breaks or doesn’t perform as expected, can you troubleshoot it? If you wanted to alter it to behaving differently, can you? This is why I press on myself to never just copy code.

Whenever I copy code, I make a habit of breaking it down. I make sure I understand every part of the code, what the code does, and how it does it. I want to make sure I know what I’m doing and learning from the code example so I can further improve my own knowledge.

For example, I’ve never worked with asynchronous programming prior to writing my project Discord bot. I was fortunate that the Discord .NET community has really great documentation on how to get started. with all the necessary code. When I was following the documentation and using their code, I made sure to break down each line to make sure I knew what I was writing. This even lead me down a rabbit hole of reading the Microsoft documentation for understand what asynchronous programming is.

I’ll be honest, I’d have no idea how to troubleshoot my bot if I ran into any issues. Not going to say I’m an expert, but I definitely learned a lot about asynchronous coding.

It’s always good to keep learning.

Getting Started with Containers

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For a while now, I’ve been wanting to know and learn more about containers. Nothing like a new job that specializes in containers to jump start that process.

If anyone is wondering where a good starting point is for learning what containers are, might I recommend the Docker tutorial container getting-started. 

$ docker run -d -p 80:80 docker/getting-started

This is a simple image that includes a tutorial website that takes you through the basics of using Docker. Goes through how to pull an image, build an image with code, update an image, and deploy all with using the CLI. Doesn’t really get into orchestration but does bring it up near the end. However, an added benefit in my book, it’s a fully functioning image that includes a multi-page website. Perfect for running quick container tests.

It may not be what you intend to do with a container, but it is very nice baseline. So much so, I’ve started using it to play around with the container services in AWS. Started off by deploying a copy of it to an ECR repo. From there, I’ve used it to test out different scenarios in ECS and EKS. Testing out EC2 vs Fargate instance types; testing out multiple deployments behind a load balancer; and testing a multi-container task. Perfect for helping me know I’m deploying my containers correctly and they work. I know I can build my own container and test it locally, but I haven’t gotten to that point yet.

I do have a couple of my own ideas to try testing out as well. Just need to build the images. Current plans include my Discord bot, a V Rising game server, and some of my own website builds. The bot will be interesting as I haven’t yet tested .NET Core in Linux and want to give that a try. The V Rising server is Windows only, so that will be nice experience with a Windows container. The websites will likely be Blazor/.NET Core, so Windows is a given; but Linux is an unknown. Similar to my Discord bot currently. Either way, I’ll be learning along the way.

Ever Evolving

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Something I try my best to embrace and keeping looking towards is to constantly evolve. While have loose ideas about what I want to document, I’ve been constantly changing my mind and making tweaks to this sight.

Well, it’s time to evolve once again. While I have been continuing to try and define myself as a programmer/developer, I’ve been finalizing what elements I want to focus on. Technology is ever expanding, but if I can’t find some amount of focus, I’ll have a much more difficult time finding my place.

On that note, I am planning to focus my attention towards C#, .NET, HTML5/CSS, SQL, and GIT. While quite a nice spread of tech, all of these work hand-in-hand. Not required, but all things I’m already familiar with, but lacking expertise. With this, I plan on updating this blog once again to help track my individual projects.

Just a quick teaser, one of these projects is I’m working on my own Discord bot written in C#. Also mulling the idea of my own site I build from scratch using ASP.NET Core Bazor.