January 24th 2026. It seems like a good time for my first blog post of the year. Even though this is the first blog post that’ll publish in 2026, it’s actually the second one I’ve written. I wrote one earlier today that I plan on publishing Monday morning—it’s already scheduled. But before I did that, I wanted to get something out there explaining my, at this point, about five-month hiatus.
I started off 2025 trying to blog every day and made it quite a ways into it, but the work schedule, the travel schedule, everything just kind of bombarded down. So it became a little more sporadic, but I was okay with that. I didn’t want it to become a chore, and it was absolutely becoming a chore. I picked it up again and was doing good in August leading up to Black Hat and DEF CON.
But then at Black Hat, I sat down and had an interview with Dave Bombal, who was super nice. We’re actually planning on getting together for another interview again. But as expected—his channel has a very, very large following—the interview really kind of blew up, and my email inbox got inundated with people asking me about the Chasing Your Tail code.
I will be blogging about that code again very soon, but after that video posted, within a couple of days I received literally hundreds of emails asking me questions about the code, and many of them containing stories about people being followed, people being stalked, etcetera. I think some were serious, some were just people trolling me—whatever it was. I was able to keep up with the emails for a couple of days, and then I just basically had to throw them all to the wayside and ignore anything new that came in on that topic.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care or didn’t want to help people. Anyone who knows me knows that. But I also had to protect a little bit of my mental health. I had a very busy work and travel schedule and had to focus on the things that I needed to do before I could respond to those.
So if you were one of the people who reached out to me during that time and was serious—my apologies. As I said, it wasn’t that I didn’t care. I was literally getting hundreds a day at some point, which is kind of insane to think about. So I just had to step away from everything for a while, focus on the things that I had some control over. I took a few weeks around the holidays to relax, and now I finally feel like I’m getting back in the groove.
So like I said, I’ve got a new blog post coming out Monday. I will likely write another blog post this week about the Chasing Your Tail tool. Now that Claude Code has improved by leaps and bounds over what it was even a couple months ago, I’m definitely going to be using that to refactor the code, and I have some other new capabilities that I plan on adding in there too.
So I am alive and well. I just had to take a mental health break and step aside from everything. But I’m looking forward to making 2026 the best year ever.
Thanks, Matt