Heya friend!

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

INTRO

So I'm back from CloudFest. I'm really happy with the experience overall. I'm not sure if it'll be worth it financially. That said, I'll definitely go back for the hackathon at the very least.

The hackathon was such a great experience. It was my first one, and I was so blown away by it. Joost did a small write up on it that I found great.

From a business perspective, CloudFest was a rollercoaster of emotions. I'll expand about it in the business section. Lots of conversations. I also got invited to a panel at the last minute with big hosting companies like Kinsta and GoDaddy. Definitely felt some impostor syndrome being there as a solo founder.

I also did my first coding livestream before heading to CloudFest. I wasn't sure if it's something I'd be good at, but my first time doing it went well. This is going to be one of my marketing initiatives going forward. I'll talk more about it in the marketing section.

PRODUCT

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

Lots of stuff happening with the product at the same time. I'm slowly pushing out different parts of the Radicle support change. I should be wrapping it up officially this week.

I also decided to turn on PHP's just-in-time compilation (JIT) in the latest release of the runtime. I heard some good feedback on it. That said, I'm not sure if it makes sense with Lambda still since the opcache gets destroyed with the Lambda. So there's a chance that I'll revert the change in the future. But, for now, I'll keep it on to see!

I also worked on adding support for Valkey. If you never heard of Valkey, that's normal! Redis changed their open source license last year. This caused a lot of drama within their community. As a result, the open source maintainers of Redis forked the project, and it became Valkey.

The main reason to look at Valkey right now is cost. Valkey costs at least 20% less than Redis for essentially the same features. This might change over time much like MySQL and MariaDB aren't exactly the same anymore. But for now, you're essentially getting the same thing for cheaper with Valkey.

Both Radicle support and Valkey should go live this week.

MARKETING

So I did my first coding livestream two weeks ago. I'm calling it Puttering on Ymir. It's a reference to the article I like so much!

While I got little done during the stream, I think it went well anyways! I was really worried I wouldn't be able to talk consistently throughout the stream. Just watching someone code silently or with spaced out comments isn't very interesting. I think I did a good job narrating what I was doing for the whole stream.

My goal is to do a livestream every two Sundays on average. I think that's the right weekday and pace I can pull off. So if all goes well, the next one will be this Sunday!

The other marketing effort was obviously going to CloudFest. Jury is still out if that was worth it. It cost me about USD$3,500+ in all. I still want to go back, but maybe I'll stay less time or find some way to reduce my costs. The hackathon does comp a lot of stuff, so there's no reason not to go for that at least.

BUSINESS

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

Good news! My vanished customer is back. They signed back up and messed up my open dashboard. 😅 They'd lost the grandfathered rate, which meant they were paying $169/month. But I reverted them to the grandfather rate. (Good buy $130/month 🥲) Sad, but felt like the right thing to do.

Outside that, CloudFest was a roller coaster of emotions. The hackathon was great. I got a last-minute invite to a panel with hosting companies and agencies. (Wrote LinkedIn post about it.) Felt a lot of imposter syndrome sitting there with GoDaddy and Hostinger as a solo founder.

I had some meetings lined up for consulting work. Those didn't work out. I felt very hopeful something might happen, but it's the nature of things. I'm still worried about my future on the consulting front. I still got work for now so it's not an immediate issue.

I also had conversations with an executive where they basically said that Ymir solved a real problem, but brought a new one: reliance on an hyperscaler. Due to how things are developing geopolitically, there's a strong desire to avoid American companies. (Wired covered this two days ago.)

That was a real bummer of a discussion, and it was a definitely an undercurrent at the entire event. But there's nothing I can do about it. I built Ymir for AWS Lambda and no one has a product that's as good as Lambda either.

I had some ups as well! I had some great conversations at the CloudFest VIP dinner. This led one VP at one of WordPress's major agencies to ask me to send them a one pager about Ymir. While I didn't sign an NDA, I'll keep things low key for now. But if it works out, everyone would know the site that Ymir is hosting and it's a great fit for the technology.

I had a lot of other good conversations and people to follow up with. None with any sort of immediate impact, but, like I said in the panel, a lot of what I can do with Ymir is make sure relationships are in place so that I'm top of mind when the right client comes along. I think I continued to do that with CloudFest.

Carl