Heya friend!

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

On February 19th, 2021, I wrote the first Ymir report. I had in mind that I'd try to do a report on February 19th to celebrate the five-year milestone. As you can see, I wasn't able to do it. 🙃

The reason was that I wrapped up my gigantic 14,000 word year in review two days before. I was and still am quite drained from the endeavour. 2025 was an eventful year for me on many fronts. It took me almost three months to write the whole thing. (There's something funny, or maybe ironic, about spending a quarter of a year to write a year in review! 😅)

I didn't have the energy to write the report right away. That said, I didn't want to let the milestone come and go. So here I am! I thought I'd just share some unedited thoughts.

To start, the milestone feels really serendipitous because I'm so close to being done with Laravel support. I was hoping to get the timing right and announce it then, but alas. 🥲 Even if I didn't hit the date to launch it, there's no denying that this is an important moment in Ymir's product history. Ymir will finally move on from WordPress.

Speaking of WordPress, I don't regret spending five years trying to make Ymir work in the WordPress ecosystem. (For better or worse, I don't do regret in general! 🤣) There were some hard lessons to learn, but it also gave me insights that I wouldn't have had any other way. It's obvious to me that the partnership with BuiltFast wouldn't have happened without those insights.

The reason I could get those insights is that I started talking, but also listening to what was going on in the WordPress hosting space. I didn't talk to WordPress developers half as much as I talked to hosting executives or large agency owners. Some of them also let me be a fly on the wall for some of their discussions, which was also priceless.

This changed how I view the product over the last five years. I went from wanting Ymir to be a developer tool like Bref and Vapor to seeing that as only one use case for the product. Now, I see it more as a platform that developers can use, but also one that companies can build their own serverless products on.

It's definitely a bummer that I still can't work on Ymir full time after five years. At the same time, it continues this naïve trend I have of underestimating how bad I am at marketing and business. (Nothing has changed since my 2015 year in review! 🤣) I'm just glad that I compensate for it by being willing to just power through and not die.

Right now, I'm still on a roller coaster. Sometimes I feel so confident that I wasn't crazy, that this will all work out for me and that it's just around the corner. Other times, I'm full of doubt and I believe I'm actually just bad at business and I just will never make it.

These days I listen to the Mostly Technical podcast a lot. Aaron Francis is someone who has all the advantages that I'd expect a developer with a successful business to have. I thought anything he released would be successful right out of the gate. Yet he's there, not sleeping, anxious, trying to survive and make it himself.

Being able to see that keeps me grounded. Business is hard for most of us. Even for those you thought would have it easy.

That's why I do these reports. I hope someone else reads them and it gives them some strength, the way hearing Aaron does for me. We all need it.

Carl