Profile For Brett Aquila

Thanks again, everyone, for the amazing replies! I'm deeply grateful to all of you for the incredible contributions you've made over so many years.

Davy, Kearsey, and others, I'm more than happy to save your stuff and send it to you. Please note that I will never delete any content from this website. Every last word will be archived permanently. It just won't be publicly visible in this format.

In the near future, if you do put something together, I may be able to offer some advice to help out along the way, and I may also send some materials your way in a format you can easily use. I won't disappear. I'll keep my email address active.

Im wondering if we can put together something inspired by what we've had here, but a much lighter version using a stock off the shelf site hosting and building tools.

Yes, you certainly can. There are many places like SquareSpace that are designed so that anyone can have their own website. They offer a wide range of templates and features to choose from. I only know of that one off the top of my head, so it's not a formal recommendation, per se, but it's one worth considering based on what little I know about it.

Discord is another option, though I was never fond of it. The interface is annoying and obnoxious, and I'm not sure it has the features you guys would want. I think there are better options.

I'm not of Italian decent (native Cali dude) But share that same attitude, and say whatever I think, when I think it. NO Sugar on it, if they don't like it, or get pizzed off, Too F'in bad..... I take after my mom, in so many ways lol

I've tried very hard to tone it down over the years, but it's hard to go against one's nature and habits. A few of the moderators even contacted me privately over the years to let me know it's time to rein it in a little bit, and I always respected and appreciated them for saying so, and took it to heart.

So I'll be available to send you materials and offer some advice.

As far as the High Road goes, I may, in fact, create an app out of it at some point. I don't think it would be too massive a project, but I have no clear plans at this point. It was truly ahead of its time and far more effective than anything else I had found. The next version would be AI-driven, making it ten times more effective.

I’m curious now that this forum will soon be no longer holding you back in life as you said. What business ventures are next? Anything trucking related still?

I don't have any concrete, locked-in ideas yet, but nothing trucking-related, unless I decide to put up a new AI-driven version of High Road somewhere.

I'm going to take some time to hone my skills and explore the emerging new wave of technologies, including Bitcoin, Nostr, AI, blockchain, and other technologies designed to circumvent the existing infrastructure and create new, parallel systems.

Our societal infrastructure is so corrupt that most of it just can't be saved at this point. The way the government manipulates money, the medical industry, the food industry, the major players in tech (Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc), and our education system has all become very toxic. If you examine this closely, it is painfully clear that a significant portion of the profits being generated in our society today is based on harming people rather than helping them.

New, decentralized technologies are needed. Bitcoin is the big one that we desperately needed to give us hope for resurrecting a sound financial infrastructure. Thank God for that.

However, there needs to be an entirely new way of raising and educating children, managing our physical and mental health, organizing our communities, and maintaining our online presence, amongst other things.

Quite honestly, our society will not remain viable much longer if we don't change course. You can't take on the government and large corporations head-on; you have to go around them by building better systems that give people an alternative:

• Homeschooling and smaller, more specialized community schools run by parents and artisans willing to teach
• Natural eating with proper nutritional guidance, not some upside-down pyramid of lies
• Natural medicines and healthcare that keep you healthy instead of keeping you sick and addicted to pills that don't work
• Growing and raising your own food, or buying direct from local farmers
• Decentralized online communities like Nostr, instead of government-infiltrated mass media and social media

....and a whole lot more. The needs are vast and the possibilities endless. So I'm going to take time to hone my skills, explore what's needed, and pick some projects I feel suit me best.

Thank you for sharing your tool set, sounds like you have a hell of a lot more developer experience than I was ever aware of.

I've always been a loner who keeps to himself. Very few people know much about me. Not long ago, I had a conversation with a friend from high school (I'll be 54 years old next week), and I shared more about who I am and some of the things I've done with my life.

She almost passed out! She was like, "Wow, none of us ever knew you had any of that stuff going on! We thought you were just some regular dude who hung out with us!"

I'm into a lot of different things, but most of them are things that people can't relate to or don't care about, so I don't bother them with it. I just quietly do my thing.

If anybody would like to help out or come up with ideas, I'm all ears

I'm happy to offer advice to anyone interested in taking on a project like this. After almost 20 years, I can certainly help people cut to the chase and avoid some painful lessons.

I had several people who wanted to buy it, but they wanted me to stay and help lead the way. I needed a clean break so I could pursue other things. It was like a death in the family. I eventually sold all the assets to different parties for much less than I could have gotten for the business, but it was really my only option to allow me the freedom I needed.

Yeah, I can understand and relate to that as well. It's impossible to hang on and move on at the same time. You must commit to a direction.

Thanks Brett, for everything! I've thoroughly enjoyed riding this through with you and everyone else here.

Thanks for everything, Old School! You will have your own tribute on the Thank You page that I'll leave up when I shut things down. You've been an inspiration to me because you've always handled yourself with such poise and treated people with kindness and respect. Several other moderators also fit that description, but I'm hesitant to name names because there are so many, and no one deserves to be left out.

However, tributes will be featured on the Thank You page for quite a few people.

I always gave everyone the cold, hard truth in my New York Italian style. That didn't make me any friends, but I helped a lot of people, and I always maintained the highest integrity. You and the other moderators have always provided the same level of help and integrity, but you all did it with much more grace and style. I tried to emulate you guys, I really did. It just isn't in my nature.

Speaking of technical stuff, I'm curious what tech stack are you using to build, maintain, and host the site?

I started this site almost 20 years ago, so it featured the classic LAMP stack: Red Hat/CentOS Linux, Apache, MySQL, Memcache, PHP, with JavaScript/jQuery on the front end. That is still what this site runs on.

Nowadays, I use a completely different stack for projects, which includes Rocky Linux, Nginx, Python, FastAPI, Uvicorn, and various databases, depending on the specific needs. These include Pinecone for embeddings, Neo4j for graph databases, SQLite for quick/easy tasks, and I've recently started using Postgres for larger relational tasks, as well as vanilla JavaScript on the front end.

For mobile apps, I'm using React Native, although I haven't published any yet; I'm currently focusing on development work.

I've tossed around the idea of building my own trucking related site on and off the past couple of years, but never moved forward on it because of the great community that is already here... I'm wondering now if I shouldn't revisit the idea and build something new?

YES! You should definitely do it. 100%!

If nothing else, you'll learn a ton. I never went to school for anything related to computers. I learned everything online. I built things as I needed them, and everything I've built has always been in the real world. It's one thing to study and practice, but it's quite another to open your products to the public.

To this day I still edit files on the live production server and upload them with SFTP. If mainstream developers saw my workflow they would consider it criminal!

One of the reasons I'm shutting this down is to release the traffic to the next generation of mentors. If I keep it up it will continue to steal a lion's share of traffic, and I don't want to do that.

So, to anyone here considering a project for trucking, do it! Many of you are amazing people who possess the experience, knowledge, and good intentions necessary to mentor the next generation, and God knows they need it.

Thanks for all the wonderful thoughts and well wishes! I sincerely appreciate it more than I can even express.

I very much understand why so many of you would love to see TruckingTruth continue, and I deeply respect that. But I need to be honest about why it can’t simply be handed off.

First, the site is far more complex than it may appear from the outside. There’s a massive custom codebase that powers this website, which includes adaptive learning algorithms, integrations with major recruiting systems, AI integration, multiple servers, databases, backups, and caching layers, all of which I’ve personally built and maintained for nearly two decades. It’s not something that can be realistically run or supported without deep technical expertise.

Second, I could never fully separate myself from the legal responsibilities tied to the TruckingTruth name. Even if someone else took control, the risk would always remain with me, and that’s something I can’t carry forward.

For almost three years, I’ve wrestled with how to keep TruckingTruth going, or whether it could be handed off in some way. I’ve turned over every option I could think of. But between the technical realities and the legal responsibilities, it has become clear that it’s simply not possible. Holding onto it this long has even held me back in my own life, and I finally need to accept the reality of the situation and let it go.

What I can do is honor the people who made this community special. If you’ve been a major contributor and would like a copy of your own forum posts, I’d be glad to create an archive for you. I can't do it for everyone, but I certainly can for the long-time contributors who have written dozens of article-length replies that are truly special. So if you want your forum posts, I can make that happen. I'll let you know how we'll go about that very soon.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you. TruckingTruth has been one of the great privileges of my life. Together we built something that truly mattered, and I’ll never forget the impact this community had - not just on those who came here for guidance, but on me personally.

Wow, I'm rather surprised to hear you're leasing, but once you've been a business owner, it's hard to go back to being an employee unless you've just had enough of the responsibility. So I can understand that.

I don't think leasing is a good business opportunity, but you're the last person I'm worried about. You're a super high-performer that has such a vast amount of experience, drive, and intelligence that you're always going to find success in the end. No one hits a home run on every challenge they take on, but you can't keep a good man down, so you'll always rise to the occasion.

When I first came off the road in 2006, we had a massive ice storm in Buffalo, NY, where I lived at the time. I bought a chainsaw, grabbed my nephew and his buddy, and we went out looking for work cleaning up yards. Once the ground work was mostly cleaned up, the rest was up in the trees.

So I bought a bunch of climbing gear and learned to climb. I started a full-blown tree service and ran that for two years. I always knew the tree service was a short-term thing. It was something I could use to get by until I figured out my next thing. As the tree work started to dry up, Trucking Truth started to take off, so I decided to throw caution to the wind and go for it. I wanted to see if I could turn this into something.

Well, I damn sure didn't expect it to turn into a massive odyssey spanning almost two decades! But hey, you won't know until you try, right?

So maybe this lease will end up being a transition to the next thing, maybe it will turn into an Odyssey itself and you'll own 150 trucks ten years from now. There's no way to know, but one way or another you'll rise to the top of whatever you commit to. You're that kind of guy, and I wish you all the best.

Stay with it! You still have time!

It's incredibly effective. If you keep working through it, you'll blow through the tests like they're nothing.

Best of luck!

It is crazy to think of all the love and support and even fighting and drama we have had over the years.

We've had it all, haven't we? What a ride!

Would you believe 10 yrs ago today i stepped on the bus for Prime.

Wow! Happy Truckin' Birthday to ya! That's very cool.

Wow. First off Brett, thank you for everything. I wouldn't have the career that I do, had I not found this community. I feel a kindred spirt to you in many ways. We have had many spirited conversations and threads here.

I feel the same, Davy. Thank you for that. We've had a ton of great conversations over the years, many of which changed people's careers and sometimes their lives. We didn't shy away from anything.

I wish you the best in life. This has been one place where drivers could get truth with no sugar coating.

Thanks Big Scott! That was always the goal - to give the straight, honest, hardcore truth and opinions people needed. It made us a lot of friends and helped launch thousands of careers. All the best.

Brett I know this has to be very time consuming and you have been at it along time. You have a drive and commitment to the industry like noone I have ever met. I commend you for that.

Thanks, PJ! I started CDL school in August, 1993, at 21 years old. I had 15 years of driving, and 18 1/2 years of mentoring, with a little overlap between the two. That gives me a total of just over 32 years in the industry. I can't even really get my head around that.

When I started driving, we didn't have internet, cell phones, or GPS.

Here's a funny one - when Internet first came out in the mid 90's they installed phone lines in the parking lots of truck stops. I had to buy a 100 ft phone line, and anytime I wanted to connect to the Internet, I had to run the phone line out the window, along the length of the truck, and plug it into the receptacle in the parking lot. Then I'd run back to the cab and check to see if I could get online with AOL!

If it worked, which was about a 50/50 chance, great! If not, try another receptacle. Sometimes I had to move to a different spot just to find one that worked. Let me tell ya how much fun that was in the winter!

Good times.

One thing I may be able to do is send you guys a download of your forum comments so you can use them elsewhere. Many of us wrote article-length posts to explain our viewpoints. I can't do it for hundreds of people, not without building a quick system to allow that, but I can do it for anyone who has a significant amount of advice they'd like to use again or just archive for safekeeping.

I am still open to considering ideas for preserving or turning over the content. Keep throwing ideas at me.

I still have a lot to say to so many of you, so stay tuned and keep the comments coming!

Sort of feels like the last day of high-school, people you have known for years will be going their separate ways. You may bump into them around town but it won't be the same.

Wow, that really captures it well for me. It does feel that way. It's like this uneasy feeling, not knowing what to say or do, and not knowing what comes next, but knowing it's time to move on and there's no going back.

This is a little harder than I thought it might be.