Heya friend!

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

INTRO

WordCamp Asia is coming up soon! (If you're attending, come say hi! 🙂) I spent a lot of this cycle preparing for it. I fly out in exactly a week and I wanted everything wrapped up by then.

February is going to be a busy month with a lot of travel. I'll be in Thailand until the early March. Then I'll be working from Tokyo until mid-April. I might not send another update until I settle down in Tokyo.

Work-life balance is in a good space currently. Hoping to continue the trend in Asia. But it's always a battle with my more workaholic side.

PRODUCT

You can always view the history of Ymir's product development at https://ymirapp.com/changelog.

I'm working on adding support for tags. This is another requested feature from customers who manage a lot of sites. (I've had sales calls with people managing 300+.) Tags are a necessary tool to help track cost per site.

This is a pretty big change affecting almost every aspect of the application. I'm looking to tag everything that Ymir creates with additional metadata. I'd also like it to be retroactive so that I can add tags to resources that were created before I released the feature.

MARKETING

Finished my slides for WordCamp Asia this week. I used the deck from LonghornPHP has my base, but ended up cutting and editing maybe half of it. For example, the tools and project section had to be reworked because I'm the only serverless WordPress project. This was a good opportunity to make fun of the situation 🤣

Carl Alexander @twigpress Working on my @WordCampAsia slides, my tools and projects section is going to be brief 😅 pic.twitter.com/aXGoOc6Tnm January 30th 2023 0 Retweets 17 Likes

I've been also doing a lot of load testing the past two weeks for a customer demonstration. I also wanted to test the Aurora Serverless database server feature I released last cycle. The result blew us both away. The scaling that you can achieve with a basic WooCommerce setup without any optimization is just wild.

I thought about doing a live load test on stage, but this goes against my live demo rule when giving a talk. (Basically, my experience as an event organizer is 90% of live demos backfire and end up destroying the flow of a talk.) So I managed to convince myself not to do one. But I really wanted to have something to show at WordCamp Asia, so I recorded one.

I'm sharing this video here (and in Discord), but I ended up not making it public. The feedback I got on the video was that it wasn't a good video unless you're an engineer and you understand the flood.io and AWS. If you're not part of that group, there's too much information to parse and you might get the wrong conclusion from what I was trying to test.

It's a bit of a bummer because these tests really hype me up about the future of WordPress hosting with this technology. I'm going to work on making a better load testing video in the coming months. One that's more marketing-y and less of a tech demo.

Still interested in your feedback on it if you have any 🙂

BUSINESS

You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.

February seems off to a slow start so far. I have a few trials. No cancellations or retrying cards, which is good!

I'm excited about WordCamp Asia. The last two WordCamps really helped on the business front. I'm hoping it'll be even better with me speaking at this one!

That said, I'm also worried I'll get a lot of low quality signups from the talk. Ymir isn't a good fit if you're not technical. Those customers usually require a lot of support.

Anyhow, we'll see soon 😬

Carl