Heya friend!

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

INTRO

This is going to be a short update because it was my birthday this weekend. I decided I should probably take a weekend off for a change. 🙃 So I'm keeping the update somewhat brief. (Also there might be typos lol)

PRODUCT

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

Behind the scenes, I'm continuing to work on the next phase image CDN. I wrote all the WordPress code with just unit tests. It worked first try so I was pretty happy about it lol

Carl Alexander @twigpress Holy shit, it worked lol pic.twitter.com/rYpcDyxKac twitter.com/twigpress/stat… Carl Alexander @twigpress Wrote the entire @YmirApp WordPress image processing feature using only unit tests to validate if things worked. About to deploy it to a WordPress site for the first time. 😅 pic.twitter.com/fJdce8QzKA April 20th 2022 0 Retweets 5 Likes

I decided not to release the updated plugin during the cycle just so I could have a full week to deal with things if there were issues. So the plan is to release it this week. (Maybe today?)

There's also been a lot of exciting developments on the AWS side. Lambda function URLs is a huge change which will allow me to remove the API gateway from the default serverless architecture. This will reduce cost and simplify the serverless architecture for most. 🎉

​Aurora v2 also became generally available. I'm still waiting to see how it performs in practice, but it should scale a lot better than v1. I've been asked a few times why I didn't support Aurora v1 and the reason was it scales too slowly. v2 apparently solved that issue.

MARKETING

I'm back doing marketing. I wasn't as prolific as I'd liked, but I did some stuff! First, I did a video demoing the image CDN as well as a small Twitter thread.

Carl Alexander @twigpress So for over a month, I've been working on the @YmirApp image CDN feature. I thought I could really hammer it all out in that time, but my appetite was definitely larger than what I could pull off while juggling everything else. (And ignoring other things like marketing 😅) April 26th 2022 3 Retweets 9 Likes

I also started writing the next article for the Ymir blog. It's already 1,500 words long and I don't think I've written half the article yet. 🤣 I'm hoping to get it done this upcoming cycle.

That said, I need to do more videos. I should probably write more documentation too. I've neglected all this a bit too much. 😬

BUSINESS

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

April was a super slow month. I saw across a lot of different communities that a lot of people had a slow April. Just hoping it's not a new trend. 😅

I had a net +1 customer for April so still technically growing. Still wishing it would pick up a bit faster. But I feel every month brings me a bit more conviction that this is a worthwhile product to build.

Carl Alexander @twigpress Got my @tillkruss @YmirApp endorsement last night lol pic.twitter.com/MPRbpBx7UY April 29th 2022 0 Retweets 2 Likes

Till is very technical and he's only looking now. So again, I'm ahead of the curve. (As usual lol)

Carl