Heya friend!

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

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INTRO

Heya!

This is going to be a quick update. I haven't had time to work on Ymir the past two weeks outside a small bug fix to the runtime. I mainly focused on consulting work.

It was also American Thanksgiving two weeks ago. This gave me a first taste of holiday vacations. It seems like my brain liked it because it's been a bit of struggle to get back to work since then. (Also Cyberpunk is a good game 😅🤓)

I think I'm going to try to take 3-4 weeks off to clear my mind and recharge. I try to do this each year with mixed success. We'll see if I manage! (The curse of being a workaholic!)

That said, I think I largely wrapped up my consulting work now. So I should be able to work on Ymir the next two week as the year winds down. I also want to start writing my year in review post.

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PRODUCT

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

As I mentioned, I didn't get time to work on Ymir this week. That said, it was AWS re:Invent last week. This is where AWS does major announcements.

They announced a couple of cool things! I look forward to adding them to Ymir once they're available across all regions. But really important announcement was on the Lambda side.

The announcement was that AWS Lambda now scales 12 times faster across all regions. To put things in perspective, it means AWS Lambda can now add 100 PHP workers per second.

This is an insane amount of scaling. Most Ymir customers don't need this. But since my main focus is scaling WooCommerce, I'm very excited about this change and its potential.

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MARKETING

Didn't do marketing as usual 🫠

I have a lot of documentation update I need to do. The scaling guide needs to get updated with the news from last week. I need to write a guide on how to install GD extension since some plugins only use that and not imagick.

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BUSINESS

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

November ended up being a solid month. I added a net two customers. I thought maybe I'd broken through the plateau.

Sadly, December isn't looking good at all. I have three cancellations pending. No trials. So I guess I'm not over the plateau yet. 😞

Another bummer is that some of my partnership discussions fizzled out. The hosting company couldn't find a way to integrate Ymir into their product line. I also had a discussion with a large magazine that didn't pan out.

I'm still feeling really good about the technology even if I'm still struggling to build a business out of it still. JetBrains (the makers of PHP storm) just came out with their annual PHP developer survey. Serverless is now the third most popular way to host a PHP application.

Using a server still dominates, but it's really good to see it slowly growing. It's just never as fast as you wish it was! 🤣🥹

Carl