Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Fall is almost here! August has been super busy with a lot of work going on behind the scenes. I'm happy to say that Ymir now supports SQS queues. 🥳

The feature is live and documented in the configuration reference and change log. There isn't much else to do with it for now. I'm not adding SQS support for WordPress yet, so this is really for Laravel support.

I've done a lot more stuff under the hood. I've tried to update the changelog to show some of it. But some of it is just architectural to the platform in order to support queues or Laravel.

Business is still flat. I've started working on the rebrand of Ymir to a PHP platform. I did my first demo of Ymir to a Laravel Vapor customer and it went even better than I expected.

This is giving me a lot of energy to push for Laravel support. I'm almost there now that queue support is here.

PRODUCT

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

The big news is that I finished queues. But so much went into this, it's hard to describe all the work that went under the hood for this. The queues alone required about 9,500 lines of code to be modified over 80 files. Here's what open code says about the feature scope 🤓

That I was able to knock this out in about 2-3 weeks is a real testament to how useful it is to work with AI now if you know what you're doing. The closest feature to queue in scope would have been resource tagging. It took me close to two months to develop.

Meanwhile, I did the work in a third of the time while also doing heavy refactoring of the platform, which probably required as many if not more changes. It caught so many issues early before my tests failed. It shored up testing deficiencies as well.

It's just so much fun to work with AI! I'm excited to use it to get through my backlog.

MARKETING

Continuing with AI. I started working on the changes to the Ymir brand with Gemini. I want to officially launch Laravel support with the new marketing site.

I've been doing a lot of analysis of the codebase with opencode. My goal is to understand what the platform does compared to infrastructure-as-code solutions like Terraform and Cloudformation/CDK. This helps me think about how to position Ymir.

What I'm settling on is that this is a level above infrastructure-as-code. It's more like application-platform-as-code. It's not an existing category, and I'm looking to market a new product category on top of all the serverless stuff.

That said, the idea has legs either way. You can define your PHP application in your ymir.yml and Ymir will deploy the application and manage the infrastructure for it via that configuration file. It's like having your own Heroku or platform.sh application managed in your AWS account.

As I've started getting a better grasp of all this, I'm setting more towards my next positioning statement. Right now, my current favourite is:

I especially like Modern PHP because it shows that it's about the current PHP. The cool PHP with Laravel and not old PHP with WordPress. But also modern works great with WordPress because I support Bedrock and Radicle which are modern WordPress project structures.

There are more things I'm thinking and working on. But I wanted to share a bit of where I was at with everything.

BUSINESS

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

Nothing much here still. Things are still declining as I'm losing inactive customers.

What makes me optimistic is that I did a first demo of Ymir to a Laravel consulting client. They were genuinely excited because they love Laravel Vapor and don't like that it's not being worked on anymore.

I finished my demo, and he just said, "This is great! When are you ready?"

So that makes me hopeful about the product 🙏

Carl