Heya friend!

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

INTRO

If you're in the summer hemisphere, I hope you're enjoying your summer (or your winter down there! 😅) I've had an amazing summer with lots of friends visiting. It's also been very busy with consulting work and Ymir!

Laravel support continues to progress. I think I'm finally done with most of the refactoring of the Laravel app. I've begun working on supporting SQS queues. I'll talk more about it in the product section.

I also went to my first Drupal event in Montreal last week. I enjoy conferences a lot, and this one was a lot of fun. There were some WordPress people there as well because the event started branching out beyond Drupal. (Everyone is diversifying! 😅)

Business is still trending downward. The economy isn't going super well, and I think I'm going to churn some customers not using it right now. That said, I'm feeling pretty positive about everything. Most people aren't having an easy time in business right now.

PRODUCT

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

So much has happened since the last update in July! I did a lot of maintenance and refactoring work on the core application. Ymir is now running as Laravel 12 application, I fixed bugs and refactored things like SSL certificate monitoring.

This was to lay the foundation so I could start working on SQS queues. SQS queues are a huge addition to the platform. Not only does Ymir need to manage SQS queues, but it also has to manage the Lambda functions they connect to.

I've been thinking about this feature for a long time. Most importantly, how to design the configuration part. I finished the design and development of the configuration part yesterday. I wanted to talk about it today. 🥳

Queues are a powerful tool. Ymir almost runs entirely through queues. I wanted Ymir to give you maximum control over queues. That said, I didn't want it to feel overwhelming either. To do that, I designed queues to have essentially three levels of configuration complexity.

First, you'll be able to just enable queues by saying queues: true. This will set up the default queue with all the default configuration values. Super easy to get started.

Next, you can just tweak the default queue this way:

queues:
type: fifo
memory: 512

Finally, if you want full control and multiple queues, you can do this:

queues:
high-priority:
type: fifo
memory: 1024
low-priority:
type: standard
memory: 512

So yeah, powerful, but also easy to get started with. 💖

MARKETING

I went to my first Drupal event in Montreal last week. It was a great time, and it was fun to learn about a new community. I also reconnected with a lot of old faces from back in my early days of organizing WordCamp Montréal!

Like I mentioned a lot, I think Drupal might be the next thing I look at after Laravel. But for that to happen, I need to start going to Drupal events and network there. This was a great first experience to do that.

Summer has been too busy to stream. I'm often only home to recharge my social battery and to do consulting work. Streaming isn't something I can do easily when I'm feeling this way.

It bums me out a bit because I think it would have been a lot of fun to record the work I did yesterday on queues. That said, I'm always careful not to overextend myself. Streaming right now would be too much.

BUSINESS

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

The economy is hard for most of us right now. That's whether you're looking for work or running a business. Despite that, I feel really positive about Ymir and where things are going.

I'm thinking a lot about the open dashboard right now. I like it, but I don't feel it's that useful or interesting.

I don't mind showing revenue being flat or declining. That said, I'm not sure showing subscription information is useful. I'd just copied that from Bannerbear.

I really want to do an open dashboard that makes more sense for me and Ymir. It's not the right time to work on it. I'll probably make it part of the marketing site refresh when I'm ready to rebrand to serverless PHP.

Carl