express | Re-Cycled Air

In May of this year I launched the Kernl alpha with hopes that WordPress developers would be interested in it. And interested they were! 6 months later Kernl has over 65 users from all around the globe and a host of new capabilities to make WordPress plugin and theme development easier. For instance, since launch we’ve added:

Continuous Integration with BitBucket
Continuous Integration with GitHub
Purchase Code Validation

But new features aren’t all that make a service great. For people to trust in something it must be reliable, and thats what the beta phase of Kernl is all about: improving reliability. We’ve reached a point where we feel Kernl provides enough value to the WordPress community to allow us to take some time to refactor code and add a lot more tests.

What does this mean for you? Not much. If we do our job right you won’t notice anything. The beta is still free and everyone will get big “heads up” before we start charging for the service.

Thank you to all of the alpha users who have made this possible. Without you Kernl wouldn’t be where it is today.

Over the past few years I’ve slowly accumulated some big side projects. They weren’t done for clients, but just for myself. At some point maintenance of these side projects isn’t fun anymore and hinders the creative juices. I have other things I want to work on, but having these other zombie side projects feels too much like an albatross around my neck.

After much deliberation, I’ve decided to shut down two of my large side projects: BookCheaply and Smooth Bulletin. I really believe both of these projects could do someone some good, but they were both learning projects for me and I don’t see them moving forward anymore. Effective immediately I’m disabling their Apache configs, backing up their DBs, TARing it all together, and putting it somewhere safe. I’ll keep access to the Git repos, but eventually I’ll clone a copy of those out too and archive them. If I don’t get them out of the way completely, I feel like I’ll want to work on them too much.

Shuttering these projects marks a transition for me, where I move from using Python and Django on side projects to Node.js, Express, and Angular. While apprehensive about abandoning my go-to stack for side projects, I’m excited to learn the nooks and crannies of Node (and I still use Python/Django for my day job anyways).

Here’s to the future!