Ymir Report #89 — Tackling technical debt šŸš§šŸ‘·ā€ā™‚ļø


Heya friend!

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


INTRO

So September has come and gone! It's been really busy, but not in a publicly visible way. There isn't much I can share or talk about yet so this will be a shorter update.

For example, I'm working very hard on the Ymir CLI. But unfortunately, the technical debt there has really caught up to me. So a lot of the work is still ongoing, I'll talk about it a bit more in the product section.

I'm also speaking at WordCamp Canada in a few weeks on serverless! I'm also excited to meet up with some people I haven't seen in a long time.

Otherwise, everything is pretty much unchanged on the business front.


PRODUCT

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

So adding Laravel support to the Ymir CLI has basically become rewriting a large amount of the CLI. This wasn't something I anticipated. I knew it wouldn't be easy, but, as I got to work on it, it became clear that the technical debt had to be paid now.

The Ymir CLI codebase is quite large. It's 20,000 lines with essentially no testing. The "no testing" has bothered me for a while. I even tried to do a livestream to add testing.

There's also a lot of hardcoded logic especially in the ymir init command. The architecture is poor because I don't have experience building a CLI tool of this size. There was just no way what I'd done so far would carry me beyond 20,000 lines.

So here we are, I'm doing a rewrite of essentially every command. It's been a slow methodical process of planning the architecture, slowly building it out, evolving it as we convert commands and run into new use cases. I then want to add tests to everything.

It's a lot and I'm hoping I can wrap it up in October. But it's looking like a busy month, so we'll see what happens.


MARKETING

Nothing much to share here right now. I'll be at WordCamp Canada next month to talk about serverless. It's also looking pretty likely I'll be at CloudFest USA in November as well.


BUSINESS

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

Pretty quiet this month. I talked to another Laravel Vapor customer this month. Waiting to see if they decide to use the product or not.

Carl

Ymir

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