Heya friend!

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

INTRO

Happy New Year! I hope you had a good holiday. Mine was spent working non-stop as I mentioned last update. (My body did not give out! 😅)

I spent the holidays doing consulting work. I just switched back to working on Ymir mid-week last week. That said, I've already shipped a lot of stuff! 📦🚀

The reason is that I'm slowly ramping up my use of AI. I've been using and talking about AI for a little while. The big change is I switched to using Gemini 3 Flash right at the end of the year. Before I was on Claude Sonnet because I can't afford a Claude Max subscription for Opus 4.5, but I've loved Gemini since 2.5.

I won't dive into it too much here. I'm still working on my year in review. (10,000 words right now!) There's a few thousand words on AI in it. 😅

PRODUCT

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

The first order of business coming back to work on Ymir was to do a bit of maintenance work on the runtime. There was a nasty bug that a customer identified that locked up a Lambda if PHP-FPM crashed. It's rare, but I attempted to do a fix for it.

Next, I wanted to add support for PHP 8.5. I thought I could just copy over my PHP 8.4 build and it would work. Unsurprisingly, I ran into issues doing that. I let Gemini fix it, which it did with ease!

Because Gemini did so well, I decided to tackle something I hadn't been planning to do. That's to upgrade to the latest Amazon Linux version (AL2023).

The reason I wasn't planning on doing it was that I was sure it would be weeks of work for me to do this. I don't really know how to compile PHP on Linux.

Ymir's build process is something I hacked together from Bref v1 build process. Bref is now coming out with v3 for AL2023 which is very different. They also don't support 9 PHP versions like I do.

That's why I figured it would take me of weeks of work. Compiler errors are cryptic, and I take forever to understand what's going on. The tasks seemed borderline impossible to me to do. I was planning to stay on the old Amazon Linux version forever.

Well, Gemini redid my entire build process and migrate to AL2023 in a day. I'm so excited about it! We're deep at work on the Ymir CLI 2.0 refactor now. Another monumental undertaking that'll get accomplished in a fraction of the time. 🚀

MARKETING

I've been on more podcasts and I have another one this week with BuiltFast. None of them are published still. I guess because I recorded so many of them around the end of the year. Hopefully, some are out by the next report! 🙏

I'm getting mentally ready to tackle the entire Ymir rebrand. There's not much left for beta Laravel support once I finish version 2.0 of the Ymir CLI. Once that's out, my next major endeavour after that is the rebrand.

BUSINESS

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

Nothing too crazy on the self-serve side. One customer cancelled, and I have a new trial to compensate. So maybe I'll stay flat? 😅

Carl