Ymir Report #3 — DynamoDB object cache
Heya friend!
Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building.
INTRO
So far, I’m doing ok with the two-week cycle. The only change is you might have noticed the email came on Monday instead of Friday. I realized it made little sense to send the email Friday since I work weekends so marketing week actually ends Sunday.
PRODUCT
I spent the entire week finishing the DynamoDB object cache. This was a large feature with easily the largest commit to date for the plugin. The feature required a lot of testing since it's pretty easy to mess up a website if you screw up with an object cache.
I also stumbled on a pretty significant performance bug with the WordPress HTTP API. I shared it on Twitter and on the Advanced WordPress Facebook group. Eventually, the core team contacted me and I worked on a patch for them.
MARKETING
For marketing week, I spent all of it working on documentation. I really think that great documentation is a significant marketing advantage when you have a product targeted to developers. Just look at Digital Ocean, Laravel, Stripe, etc. which are all incredibly popular with developers.
So I published two guides:
I also started working on the Ymir CLI reference. But this is a pretty large undertaking and it will take a little bit to complete. I might finish it next cycle if all goes well.
BUSINESS
You can always view Ymir's up-to-date business metrics at ymirapp.com/open. They're updated every 10 minutes.
No new customers this cycle. This is kinda inline with my expectations. I expect it’ll take a bit of time to get traction if I get any. I got some sign ups, so it’s not a complete standstill.
I've had the opportunity to work closely with one customer. I'm hoping to have more to share soon. I'm very excited because it's WooCommerce.
In fact, you'll hear a lot more about WooCommerce in the future. (Maybe even next cycle!) WooCommerce has scaling issues that are hard for traditional hosting companies to deal with. But Ymir really shines when dealing with these issues.
Part of getting the object cache done was so I could start doing serious testing with WooCommerce. So stay tuned!
Ymir
Heya friend! Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building. INTRO Heya! I did it! I have my first case study 🥳 Otherwise, I had a good time at WordCamp Europe. I had some good discussions there about the state of the hosting industry. They make me feel good about the long-term viability of Ymir, but doesn't really help in the short run. There hasn't been a lot of movement on the product this month. I came from Europe with...
Heya friend! Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building. INTRO Heya! Ymir was a bit more in the back seat in May as I focused on consulting work. This is more important as I'm still losing customers. Ymir won't be a full-time endeavour any time soon. I still want to do reports every two weeks. That said, I might skip here and there if there's not much to talk about. Not my ideal scenario, but I'm running a marathon so I...
Heya friend! Carl here. You signed up to receive updates about Ymir, the WordPress serverless DevOps platform that I’m building. INTRO Heya! Quiet cycle. Now that I'm done with the maintenance work, I'm back to working on the product. I'm slowly working towards the project creation feature, but I wanted to work on something smaller first. I ended up deciding to work on an activity feed. It's not such a small feature that I could ship it in two weeks. But I was able to wrap up and ship the...