Heya friend!

Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.

Life is never short on irony.

A few hours after I sent the last report saying how grateful I was for the partnership, I learned that Paul Carter, the CEO of BuiltFast, had died suddenly.

I can't claim to have known Paul well. It hasn't even been a year since BuiltFast and I started negotiating our partnership. That said, I tend to be a good judge of character, and I could tell he was a genuinely good human. (He'd shown it to me a few times in the last year.) That's why I talked about him and Justin a lot when I announced the partnership.

His death still hit me pretty hard. I can't imagine how it's been for Justin and Josh, the other two founders of BuiltFast. They'd worked together for close to 20 years.

I think what makes his death so difficult for me is that I had, without realizing it, put a lot of my faith in Ymir’s future in him. He was the seasoned executive, the sales/business guy who knew the hosting industry and had contacts, etc. I felt we were going to succeed because he really thought we were going to succeed.

I know I'm good at those things too. I understand the industry well, have a lot of contacts (just not the decision-makers), and I'm learning I can do enterprise sales pretty well too. (I often joke that I'd be a good sales engineer.) That doesn't change the fact that I had a lot to learn from him.

I won't get to now, and that sucks.

All three of us want to continue working on Vector, the serverless platform. I just don't know how that's going to look yet. Justin and Josh have a lot of other stuff to take care of right now.

But without him, I'm scared we might not make it. He was an enormous source of strength and conviction for me. This fear is how I'm feeling his absence most acutely right now.

But this fear will pass. It's part of the grief. I know I can fill whatever gaps need to be filled for the endeavour to succeed.

My reason for writing these reports is to write about moments like these. The highs are always easy to share. The lows bring out your inner child who just wants to hide under the bed and have it all go away.

And right now, it's a bunch of lows. I'm still not quite over the burnout. This was another hard hit to take.

One sure thing about me is that I always pick myself back up. The day after I learned the news, I started a consulting sprint to keep myself going. I'm also working on the companion article for my neurodivergence talk in August.

It's just been harder to work on Ymir. I feel like playing video games more than working on it. That said, the migration preparation is progressing, albeit slowly.

We'll get back there. Picking yourself back up sometimes takes a bit of time.

Carl