I guess I’ll start this by acknowledging the milestone that this is my 10th year in review. (You can read the previous ones here.) It’s a milestone that comes with mixed feelings. In a way, that’s also the best way to describe how I’m feeling as 2024 comes to a close.
On the one hand, I feel like I’ve had an amazing year. Consulting was slower than last year and Ymir still isn’t a business I can work on full time. I’ve been pretty zen about it overall. I used the extra free time to enjoy life more.
Through therapy and relationships, I’ve learned so much about myself this year. This is a continuation of the journey I started last year exploring my neurodivergence. I feel so thankful for the life choices “Past Carl” made, not knowing why he was doing them.
Honestly, until September, I thought this year in review would be kinda boring. It was going to be something like, “Didn’t do too much professionally. Lived life. Continued exploring my neurodivergence.” But, as a lot of us who work with WordPress know, everything changed in September when Matt decided to go after WP Engine.
Since then, things have simply gotten worse for the WordPress project. We’ve also had the 2024 US elections as well as other world events this fall that make the world feel like a darker place than it did when the year started. The future of humanity doesn’t feel too bright to me right now.
This affects me a lot for reasons that I’ve been exploring in therapy this year. But I can’t help that it colours how I’m looking back at this year. It brings a lot of grief and questions about where I want to go from here.
Dialing back the travelling
Last year was the most travel packed year of my life. I didn’t know going into the year if I’d keep the same pace. But, in the end, I did a lot less traveling.
Some of it was for financial reasons. I made a lot less money this year and traveling since the pandemic is pretty expensive. Even going to a WordCamp isn’t the inexpensive trip it used to be.
I’ll also be honest that my heart hasn’t been into traveling this year either. As I mentioned last year, I realized traveling was a tool I used to manage my ADHD. Being in unknown places and meeting new people was super stimulating, especially because my home life was pretty quiet.
This year, my home life has been full of excitement. (It’s why I’m happy making less money and just enjoying life right now.) My ADHD side is super happy right now. (My autistic side is struggling more and I’ll talk about that later.) Because of that, I’ve had a lot less interest in traveling.
WordCamp Phoenix
I started the year with a small trip to Phoenix to speak at WordCamp. WordCamp Phoenix used to be one of the largest WordCamps before COVID. It was a smaller affair this year showing the continued impact COVID has had on WordCamps.
I was accepted to give a Serverless WordPress talk. It was the same one I gave at WordCamp Asia last year. The talk went really well. There were a surprisingly large amount of infrastructure experts in attendance, considering the size of the WordCamp!
One person in attendance was Pantheon employee. They approached me to discuss serverless WordPress. Apparently, this was something they were exploring internally and needed help with.
This started a furious two months of negotiation. (None of which was under NDA.) It was an extremely stressful period for me. It’s also the closest I came to selling Ymir so far. I’m not actively looking to sell, but this is what made sense here.
WordCamp Asia
While this negotiation was going on, I left for Asia again. I attended the second WordCamp Asia in Taipei. It was a good WordCamp, but I enjoyed it less than the previous one. The energy didn’t feel as good as the first one in Thailand.
Taipei is a cool city that I was excited to visit a bit. I’m glad I didn’t stay too long because the weather wasn’t that great. We also dodged a big earthquake by two weeks! 🫢
While I was there, I was also very stressed with the Pantheon situation. I was talking to people I knew there about it because I felt pretty out of my depth. I was also taking calls with them in the middle of the night. (The joy of the Asian time zones!)
3rd time in Tokyo
Following WordCamp Asia, a lot of friends were heading to Tokyo for a week or two. It was fun to be across the world with a lot of my friends. I enjoyed being a bit of a tour guide since I love the city so much. (Not that I’m a Tokyo expert by any stretch!)
On my side, I used it as an excuse to rent a Tokyo apartment for a third time! I stayed in the same building as my second trip. I definitely feel like the area is a real winner for me.
I like being close to a good weightlifting gym. I also had a really great ramen place nearby. It was easy to take the subway to my preferred co-working spaces. All these things helped me maintain a good routine while I was away.
That said, the trip was really hard this time around. Trying to negotiate with Pantheon from Tokyo was very difficult. I wasn’t sleeping well and struggling a lot mentally for multiple reasons.
This seems to be the coin flip with Tokyo. If everything lines up well, like my second trip, it feels like a great place for me to take time for myself. But if it doesn’t, the time zone makes things very difficult.
My hope for that trip was that it would be more like the second trip. However, it ended up more like the first one. I miss the city at times, but I’m not sure yet when I’ll be back.
It was still great to be in the city with all my friends to share my love of the city. I also got to hangout with my favourite substack writer! I also got to meet one author of the great Tokyo book I recommend to everyone.
WordCamp Europe
Following my return from Tokyo, I stayed largely put until WordCamp Europe. In the past, I turned my trip to WordCamp Europe into a larger trip for a few weeks. I didn’t this time. I was in and out for the WordCamp. (But it was long enough for me to catch COVID 😅)
This is when I really started to dial back the travelling. I already had less interest in travelling at that point. But I could already see that this year was going to be harder financially. Europe is a pretty expensive destination for me, and I didn’t have the budget to stay any longer. (Next year in Basel will be even worse from a cost perspective.)
That said, the WordCamp itself was great. I still think WordCamp Europe is miles ahead of all the other WordCamps in terms of energy, attendance, fun. It’s definitely my favourite of all the flagship WordCamps.
Burnout and WordCamp US
Outside of a short trip to Calgary Stampede (which made me miss the inaugural WordCamp Canada 😢), I stayed largely put in Montreal during the summer. The summer was quite action packed! Like I mentioned, my ADHD side has been really happy this year.
But the flip side is that I didn’t manage my autistic side well. A few weeks prior to WordCamp US, I suffered a pretty bad autistic burnout. It left my social battery pretty much dead.
The timing wasn’t great since my goal for WordCamp US was to network for consulting and Ymir. I spent a lot of time leading up to the trip resting and micromanaging my social battery. I definitely wasn’t even close to 100% leading up to the trip, but I was functional.
That said, I had to do a lot of social breaks while in Portland. I’d often do networking for an hour or two, then run back to my room to sleep. This made me miss my friend‘s first WordCamp US talk which I slept through.
Even if it was difficult to manage my social battery, I was able to do some good networking there. I got a consulting contract, caught up with agency contacts, promoted Ymir some. I have some more stuff in discussion for next year which I hope will pan out. 🤞
So overall, I was feeling great about the WordCamp until I woke up after Matt’s talk. (Yes, I also slept through his! 😅) It’s hard to describe the mood change when I came down from my room after. Everyone went from being excited to deflated. The afterparty was pretty uncomfortable as well.
WordPress in decline
As I mentioned in the intro, since then, things haven’t gotten much cheerier from my perspective. While I don’t think WordPress, the software, is going away, I think the damage this is doing to the WordPress community is irreparable. On top of that, I think this is accelerating the decline of the community, which never quite recovered from COVID.
WordPress as a market hasn’t felt healthy in a little while. I kept these opinions to informal discussions I’d have with other people. That said, Joost posted an excellent article showing the decline of not just WordPress, but other open source projects.
This fight reinforces this narrative in my mind. You don’t extort your largest competitor for a percent of their revenue if the pie is growing for everyone. You do that when you’re in a market that’s not growing anymore.
Grieving a different time
One of the weird things with having a decade of year in reviews is that it can feel weird looking back at them. (One can only imagine what it’ll feel like if I get to 20 years!) The WordPress community and the world were so different when I started writing them. Everyone was so happy and optimistic back then.
There are people who’d been in the WordPress community during that period that were trying to recapture that magic in the recent years. But I think that, since Matt’s keynote, the reality has settled that those times are over and won’t be coming back. Instead, it feels like a lot of us old-timers are grieving and unsure where to go from here.
For me, the WordPress drama, as well as how world events unfolded this year, reignited a lot of grief I thought I’d put behind me. I started talking about it in my 2021 year in review. I described it as “COVID grief”.
This “COVID grief” was really grief for the way the world was in the 2010s prior to COVID. The future felt brighter and full of possibilities then. Today, the world feels smaller and darker. What’s happening with the WordPress community is just one manifestation of that.
I’ve spent a lot of time processing this grief. I’m not sure if it’s not just part of growing old and looking back with rose-tinted glasses. I’ve also come to realize that my autism comes with a large amount of naiveté. Maybe this was always there, and I just didn’t see it. (E.g. Russia annexed Crimea in 2014.) So the grief is just me struggling with cognitive dissonance around that.
Putting good out into the world
This grieving process has me thinking a lot about where to go from here. There’s such a strong pressure to withdraw. My mind screams, “Screw this! I’m just going to disconnect from everything and play video games.”
To be clear, I’ve done a lot of withdrawing. I’m largely off Twitter now. Although I did start going on LinkedIn more, but I haven’t actively started posting yet. I reduced my news intake significantly and stopped following what was going on with the conflict between Automattic and WP Engine.
But a part of me doesn’t want to withdraw completely. So I’ve been trying to figure out what I could do. I spent a lot of time thinking about it this fall.
What I settled on for now is this idea of “Putting good out into the world”. What I mean by that is that I have no control over the larger events happening around me. Even if the world feels darker, I can make it a bit brighter by putting good out into the world where I can.
I have a podcast I’ve been co-hosting for a few years. I’m working with Bob to change it to be more like a fireside chat with developers. I’m hoping we can talk about more than just WordPress and programming. There’s a lot more to our life experience as developers and I’d like to talk more about that.
Note: I took so long to write the year in review that the first episode is out 😅
I still want to talk at conferences, even WordCamps. I don’t want to exit the community completely like some others have. But I’ll apply to talk about things that are WordPress adjacent even if it makes it less likely I get accepted.
I also want to keep building tools that make developers happy. Ymir still isn’t a runaway success, but the people that use it really love it. That brings me a lot of joy and it’s a guiding light for me when I think about the product.
Neurodivergence and therapy
Last year, I spent a lot of my time sharing my thoughts on autism and ADHD. I was making so many interesting breakthroughs. It felt like such an exciting time and I was so happy to share everything I was learning.
I forget where I read it, but it’s normal to enter a phase “Won’t shut up about it” excitement. I think I was very much in that phase last year. I feel I slowly grew out of that phase during the year.
It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to talk about it anymore or that I’m not making new discoveries. I still want to do a conference talk about it for example. (I applied to WCEU with it so we’ll see! 🤞) I think it’s been really important to realize the impact this all has on me. I’m sure it could help others as well if shared in the right way.
New therapist
In May, my old therapist abruptly dropped all their clients because of health issues. Anyone who’s had to find a therapist can tell you how challenging it can be. Quebec has an absolutely terrible directory site, and it’s very time consuming to get anything out of it.
I decided to try to find someone that worked with autistic adults. A lot of the professionals I was reaching out to didn’t have any availability or a wait list. I thought it would take me weeks to find someone, but I managed to find someone relatively quickly. That said, I was lucky because I tried to refer someone else to them and they wouldn’t take them because of lack of availability. (They also didn’t have a wait list. 😅)
I’ve been very happy with this new therapist. There are definitely things I miss from my old one. (E.g. they had a very strong no bullshit attitude, which I appreciated.) But that’s to be expected since I didn’t stop because I didn’t like them!
That said, it’s been very educational to work with someone who works with autistic adults. With my prior therapist, I’d be the one doing research and discussing things. Now, I have a therapist that can suggest things for me to read about.
The other big change is that my first therapist was French speaking and this new one is English speaking. While my first language is French, I was doing all my reading and research in English. (Most of the resources are in English as well.) This made it a lot harder for me to communicate things clearly or explain concepts to them, since they only spoke French.
Giftedness
Another benefit of seeing a different therapist is that they can bring new insights to you. While it’s not why I picked them, my new therapist also specialized in helping gifted adults. Through the year, they would point out that I was probably gifted, and some issues came from that.
When they’d bring this up, I’d immediately push back on the idea. I’m often called smart or introduced as a “super smart person”. I never felt comfortable with it. It always felt so subjective to me. Even as a programmer, I know so many people who I’d consider smarter than me.
This brings up one issue with giftedness as an adult. There’s a negative stigma around it. That’s because, when we think about someone who’s gifted, it’s often in the context of someone underage. We’re thinking of a child who needs more challenging classes or special services at school.
But if an adult tells you they’re gifted, it just sounds like they’re full of themselves. It’s an ego thing, “Look at me! I’m so smart 🤓” But the reality is that we don’t really think about what happens to these gifted children once they become adults. And much like autistic adults my age or older, we’re often going through life undiagnosed dealing with issues and not knowing why.
My perception changed when my therapist sent me a paper on gifted adults to read. I think what helped me get over this “smartness” perception was the idea of capacity and not necessarily capability. What do I mean by that?
Let’s say you’re a normal person. You can juggle three balls at the same time. Well, if you’re gifted, you might be able to juggle four or five balls. Balls here could concepts, tasks, etc. But it doesn’t mean that I’m smarter or more capable of handling complex topics.
This is a relatively new insight for me, so I’m still exploring things a lot. But I think it helps explain my interest in multidisciplinary topics. For example, why I’m spending so much time thinking and talking about neurodivergence and tech! 😅
Cognitive fatigue
When I think about my neurodivergence right now, what I feel the most is mentally tired. I’ve struggled a lot to figure out why I feel this cognitive fatigue. In my head, I keep thinking about this quote from The Matrix:
You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
I think one of the unexpected side effects of being more self-aware about all the neurodivergent stuff is that there’s just more stuff I’m actively dealing with. When I was unaware, my subconscious was making all the decisions, and I was blissfully ignorant of it. Now, I’m constantly processing things through this neurodivergent lens and it’s surprisingly demanding.
It’s a disappointing development in a way. I thought knowing all this stuff would make me able to handle more. Instead, it’s a bit of a paradox. (My favourite!) I feel stronger and more self-aware, but I also feel more vulnerable and less tolerant.
Balancing a new ecosystem
One useful analogy (one of many!) that my therapist used to discuss a lot of my cognitive struggles is the idea of an ecosystem. My ADHD, autism, giftedness, etc. are all part of a larger mental ecosystem. This ecosystem is always striving to reach an equilibrium point where all these different parts are happy and satisfied.
This isn’t easy! Our lives are in constant flux and filled with uncertainties. That said, in my case, I always had good foundations and systems to help me get back towards that equilibrium state.
What changed this year for me was the nature of the imbalance. I feel that, for most of my life, the underserved side of my ecosystem was the ADHD side. There wasn’t enough excitement in my life, so I was travelling a lot, meeting strangers, switching jobs, learning new things, organizing meetups with friends, etc.
This year things flipped. For maybe the first time in my life, my autistic side is now underserved. Instead of looking for excitement, I have to do an active effort to do less and give my mind some time to rest. A good example of that was when I went to rest in my room during WordCamp US.
This is really new to me! Like I said, I’m not sure I ever had to do that in my life before. This has forced me to really take stock of what’s important for my autistic side. I’ve also been trying to be more aware when I’m overextending myself.
The importance of my lifestyle
One of the things that I’ve come to realize is super important to my neurodivergence is my lifestyle. I talked a bit about it last year. That said, it became much more obvious in therapy this year that how I structured my life is critical to my success and mental health.
Here are a few things that I found to be really key for me:
- I need to have more control over my work environment. Some days, I need to be surrounded by people. Other days, I can’t handle it. Do I need sound and music or silence? All those things change every day and I’m constantly adapting my work environment to how my mind feels. If I’m forced to go into work on specific days or I can’t zone people out, it’s not good for me or the quality of my work.
- Autistic people often need more structure in their life. I’m no different. Although that structure isn’t so much a rigid time schedule. It’s more that I need some things to happen each day for me to feel like everything is ok. I won’t list them all, but the biggest one is I need to go to the gym. This is on average 3h in the afternoon. (I rarely take meetings after 2pm for that reason. Although I’ve had some emergency ones at the gym! 🤣)
- Being able to work on different schedules. Over the years, I’ve worked from 10pm to 4am, but also the opposite, 5am to 11am. My brain can rarely work from 9am to 5pm. I also work 7 days a week because I like the structure that working every day brings.
- I also like that I can take time to rest my brain if I’m not doing ok. Or that I can spend time learning new things or puttering about with code or ideas. Obviously, it requires some discipline because I still have consulting clients and Ymir customers. But it’s still something that’s hard to do in a regular work environment.
I’m constantly in awe of “Past Carl”. He made the decision to work for himself, not knowing exactly why it felt like the right way for him. Now that I understand more why this is good for me, it feels more important than ever to make it work financially.
The reason I bring it up was that this year wasn’t the best on the consulting front. (I’ll talk more about it later.) There were times during the year where I thought that I might have to look for a regular job. I talked in therapy that the possibility of losing this comfortable lifestyle I’d built for myself was very distressing.
It’s not so much that I can’t work in a company. I can do it and I’d probably even be successful there. I just don’t feel it’s worth the quality of life I’d lose from it, even if I’d make a lot more money than I do right now.
I think that’s essentially what I found distressing about the current job market situation. I never minded sacrificing income for my mental health and freedom. But right now, it feels like I’m slowly losing the ability to have that choice. That’s what feels scary to me.
Ymir’s fourth year
Ymir is a weird state right now. On one hand, I still love the product and puttering about with it. I also think the technology is valuable, and I got further than ever before potentially selling it. I also have had some great case studies this year and definite proof that Ymir is valuable. I started writing some up this year with more coming next year.
On the other hand, if you look at the open dashboard, you’ll see that revenue is down slightly from last year and flat. I still have no idea how to price the product properly. I also stopped doing the reports every two weeks. Instead, I write one when there is something to talk about.
This was because I was busy enjoying life. The reality is that the product is stable and largely bug free. (You could say it’s largely finished software.) So I worked on it less during some parts of the year.
As with every other year, I enjoy using the year in review to reflect on how I feel about the entire journey. The reports are more where I discuss the business and the product development.
Don’t die
One advantage of being so slow doing this year in review is you can read something important at the very last second. This happened with this article (published in 2025 🤣) called “Don’t die”. It’s not super long, but this quote especially grabbed me:
The longer you survive, the more trust you earn. Markets — especially enterprise markets — value stability. Potential customers, partners, and the entire market, will eventually notice a business that continues to exist year after year after year.
Ymir started charging customers in February 2021. This means that, next month, it’ll be entering its fifth year making revenue. That’s actually a long time. I’ve seen products come and go during that time.
The fact I’ve been around and working on it for that long is actually starting to matter when I talk to potential customers. They see a solo founder like myself and wonder, “Is he going to keep working on the product?” I can then point them to the open dashboard and show that while I can’t work on it full time, I’m still here after all that time.
It’s been surprisingly effective.
Branching out
I think that, with everything going on in the WordPress world, 2025 might be the year that Ymir moves towards being a serverless PHP platform. This is always something I wanted to do. I built Ymir to support any PHP application. I never meant to stop at just serverless WordPress.
The first thing I’m looking to support is Radicle. This is a hybrid project structure to use WordPress with the Laravel framework. I’m a big fan of Roots. That’s why Ymir supported Bedrock from day 1.
It’s also an easy way to dip my toes in the larger PHP ecosystem. Radicle uses a lot of the Laravel framework. It’s impossible to support Radicle and not add some support for Laravel at the same time.
After that, I’m still thinking about Drupal. I didn’t go to any higher ed events this year like I wanted to. That said, they just came out with a CMS product which looks like a ready-to-use Drupal installation for non-technical people. It would be cool if I got it working on Ymir.
Beyond Drupal, I’m not sure yet. I might look at PHP frameworks or find another CMS application. I was thinking about maybe Statamic since I should have decent support for Laravel with Radicle.
Ymir Cloud?
At Laracon US, Taylor announced his next product: Laravel Cloud.
Laravel Cloud is a managed cloud platform for Laravel. What had me curious about the product at first was customer support. Having a managed platform brings with it a lot of customer support needs. So I was curious how he’d handle it as a company.
That was always my main pushback when anyone suggested I do something like Ymir Cloud. It’s hard for me imagining a bootstrapped company doing hosting support. Expectations are really high and you can’t automate it. I believe good support is talking to a person.
So I was curious about how he’d do it or what kind of support he’d offer. Well, I got my answer within a week! A few days after Laracon US, Taylor announced he’d taken $57M in funding. He has the money to hire people to do customer support! 😅
Even knowing that, I’m still thinking about Ymir Cloud a bit more than before. It’s a longer-term plan, but it’s a way I could dogfood Ymir’s enterprise tier. It’s also a way to reach the customers who are scared of AWS and usage based pricing.
I’ll probably sit on this for another year or two 🤣
Financials
Last year, I changed how I shared financial information. I think it’s useful to share where I’m at, but it doesn’t feel relevant to talk about numbers except for a few exceptions.
Slow year
It’s a bit weird reading back last year’s year in review. I sounded so ambivalent about how good my year had been. I’m not sure what I was thinking anymore. Maybe I thought the good times would continue. 😅
Well, the good times, they did not continue. This year was a difficult one for all the self-employed people I know. A lot of them went back to being employees. Personally, my income dropped roughly by a third and it would have been worse if I hadn’t gotten a lot of work in the fall.
I still have a somewhat diversified consulting income and I’ve also worked with a lot of new clients this year. That said, I’m still very dependent on a few clients. We love working together, but it’s always scary to wonder what might happen if they went away.
That said, I never know where my money will come each month. (My therapist calls it “predictable uncertainty” 😅) I have a small retainer, but it will probably end this coming year. I’ve been working on trying to set up new ones, but it’s definitely difficult.
I didn’t have Ymir pay me anything this year. So the rest of my income was from my few GitHub sponsors and my book sales. However, the book is making a bit less each year. This year, it brought in $1,350 vs $2,000 last year. It’s not a lot, but every bit helps!
Expenses
Travelling continues to be my largest expense. I spent a bit less this year, but not that much less. I’m going to fewer events, but they cost more than ever to go to. This trend doesn’t look like it’ll improve this coming year as I’m going to CloudFest which is a very expensive event to go too. Meanwhile, WordCamp Europe is going to be in Basel, Switzerland which is also 💸💸
While travelling isn’t cheap, I think that travelling to conferences and networking there has been the key factor in my survival as a self-employed consultant. I don’t think I could afford to do 6-7 WordCamps a year like I used to do. (Not that there are a lot of regular WordCamps anymore 😅) But going to the flagship ones and trying to branch off to other events like CloudFest still means 3-5 conferences a year which is still a significant expense.
Otherwise, the rest of my expenses have been stable or trending down. I try to be on top of everything because managing my money well is how I survive. I will probably audit some more services I use and try to reduce some expenses there a bit.
Continued gratitude
When you’ve done so many years in review, it becomes a bit of a challenge to know how to wrap them up. (It’s like the reverse of the blank page problem!) Many people give themselves goals for the year or make predictions. I’ve never really enjoyed that, so I’ve never done it.
For me, when I write a year in review, it’s about documenting my year and keeping notes for my future self. The past few years the exercise constantly leaves me with a feeling of gratitude. It’s truly amazing that I have the opportunity to live a life that works for me.
I know through therapy that I’m responsible for a lot of how my life turned out, but humans often discount luck. I think it’s important to acknowledge that I’ve also been lucky. Like I mentioned earlier, I organized my life in a way that worked for me without knowing why. That, to me, is still luck.
What also always makes me feel grateful is to realize how many people in my life support me in various ways. Going through life is a team effort and I’m thankful to all of them. That’s also why I’m trying to put good out into the world too. I realize I’m part of other people’s team too. 😅
I will say that, for the first time in a few years, I’m not exhausted at the end of writing this year in review. I’m not sure why exactly. Maybe it’s because I took my time to write it instead of overworking myself to get it out during the “Year in Review” window when everyone publishes them. Or maybe I’m actually doing progress with all this mental self-care work I’m doing.
This coming year is probably going to test this mental self-care even more. Let’s see where I’m at next year! 😅