Heya friend!

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

INTRO

This is the report I've been waiting to write for so long. Laravel support is finally here! I shipped the last part yesterday, which was the new CLI version. (You need version 2.1.0 to create a Laravel project.)

This is an important milestone, but there's still work to do. The next phase is to migrate Ymir to Ymir. There's still some missing pieces for that to happen. Mainly Postgres support. (I plan on migrating from MySQL to Postgres at the same time.)

That said, this was a tremendous amount of work. You never realize all the assumptions you've made until you try to undo them! 😅

PRODUCT

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

I spent a lot of time working on a good Laravel Vapor migration flow for the CLI. I don't know if it'll be used much. That said, it just felt like something you'd do if you wanted to show how much you cared about them.

I think a lot about developer experience. I think this is something Laravel excels at and it definitely makes me have a high bar. I'm really glad that I can just have AI go at it until it's good! 😅

In this case, I had it comb through all the Laravel Vapor code, the docs, etc. This allowed us to find all the configuration options to map. (Vapor doesn't have a reference page like I have in my docs.) We also did a basic Dockerfile migration workflow as well.

You can trigger the migration with the laravel:vapor:migrate command. Again, this is already really nice, but I went one step furthe. The CLI also checks if you have a Laravel Vapor configuration file when you initialize a project. If it detects one, it will prompt you to know if you want to perform the migration during the project initialization.

MARKETING

I've been trying to do a bit of marketing around the Laravel support. My experience wasn't very good.

I thought I could help people in the Laravel Vapor channel of the Laravel Discord. My plan was to just be helpful and cold DM people if I saw that they asked about what would happen with Laravel Vapor or what people were doing. I had ok experiences overall and the people I talked to seemed interested.

But then I got called out on it and asked that they ban me. So that really made me sad because I'd reached out to maybe 4-5 people. I wasn't spamming and I was still just mostly helping people because I know the product so well.

Cold outreach is hard. I didn't want to even do it, but I figured if I was helpful there it would make me feel ok. I don't know if I'll try it again. I'm still answering questions there anyways. (Even answered a question from the person who asked me to get banned 😅)

I don't know if any of this matters in the long run. Sure, I'd get a few people from this. But I don't think it's large enough to do a difference.

Marketing continues to be hard for me 🥲

BUSINESS

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

I realized last week that I have some customers that are paying the $13/month for additional projects. It's not reflected in the dashboard. It's a bug, but not worth fixing right now because I'm going to do that dashboard soon.

That said, it also means I'm not actually sure what my MRR is! But it's a bit higher than what's displayed.

Carl