Carl Alexander talks fast and a lot of
stuff he talks about touches on subjects
that a lot of developers hope to never
have to think about.
I've seen him talks in the WordPress space
and known him as the serverless guy,
having founded Emir,
a serverless DevOps platform that takes
the headache out of managing your own AWS
infrastructure.
But Carl says this is actually his second
act.
In this episode,
we get to meet the guy behind the
full-size stand-up poster and book on
object-oriented programming to talk about
his early start in programming and
robotics and how he accidentally fell into
WordPress development and the challenges
of building a business from the ground up
while being bad at marketing.
If you've never met Carl in person,
buckle up.
I think you're going to enjoy this one.
Welcome to Community Code,
Community and Code,
the podcast where we talk to the human
beings behind the commits.
I'm here today with Carl Alexander,
a longtime WordPress developer.
But really, if you know Carl,
if you've seen Carl talk,
if you have done anything like that,
you've probably associated him with the
concept of serverless for WordPress.
And we'll talk a little bit about that,
I think.
Yeah.
Welcome and yeah, tell us about yourself.
Oh my goodness.
I mean, yeah,
I think now I'm like the serverless guy,
but I was like, I,
in the twenties tens,
I was like the object oriented guy.
Basically I wrote like this, uh,
I was writing all these articles on how
to do proper object oriented programming
with WordPress.
I even wrote a book on it.
So it's like, it's like my second act,
if you will,
inside the WordPress community.
But yeah, no, I, I mean,
my trajectory has been.
Long.
I think I started programming when I was
like seven or eight years old or
something.
And then around that time,
I also did my first robotics project.
So I've been like involved in tech,
you know, from a young age too.
Like same thing with the serverless.
When I gave a talk on that,
I say like I've been assistant men for
almost...
dirty years, you know,
like I've been playing with servers since
I'm in my teens, you know?
So it was just like, uh, so yeah,
I've been around, but yeah.
And the WordPress space,
that's like my second act right now is
the stuff, but I, I, yeah,
there's a lot of stuff.
I just get hyper focused on a couple
of topics.
Like that's, that's one of them.
The other one,
we were talking just a bit pre-show.
I've been trying to do pitches for work
camps on, uh,
like mental health stuff,
like not necessarily like depression,
but just like how to, you know,
like I recently,
I don't have an official diagnosis,
but like I'm definitely autistic.
I have ADHD.
We were talking about that.
I was talking,
I basically always have a drink because I
learned early in my life that nobody would
get upset at you
if you were holding a drink or always
drinking something instead of like playing
with your hands,
even though I have like a Captain America
fidget toy and that stuff.
So I've been applying WordCamp with that
as well,
but haven't done a talk on that yet.
But it's like,
I talk a lot about it as well.
Just like less,
I'm less vocal about it and it's less
techie, you know,
like serverless kind of like sexy,
you know, like they're like, ooh,
like serverless.
Are there servers with serverless and all
that stuff?
So I get more talks about that,
but I'm really passionate about the second
thing too.
Yeah.
Let's start at the beginning.
You mentioned that you got into
programming and robotics really early.
Was computers and technology always just
sort of around you and how did that
sort of cultivate?
Oh, yeah.
My dad got a computer pretty early on
that was by Philips, if you believe,
which for the longest time,
I don't know how much people know about
Philips, but basically, like, in my mind,
Philips was always, like, razors and,
like, you know, but they're a huge...
They're a huge, huge, huge conglomerate.
And the, you know, ASML,
which everybody knows now for the chips,
spawns from Philips.
NVIDIA spawns from Philips.
It's just, again,
I didn't know how much they did tech,
but I still was like, a Philips computer?
Why isn't it like a Heuer Packard, like,
or like a, you know, Compaq,
if you remember Compaq computer or stuff
like that.
So we had a computer lab at my...
um elementary school um sorry sometimes i
look i i think of the french words
but uh basically uh but yeah in the
home entry school so i did like the
robotics project there and that was with
they were apple actually they were apple
and then it became ibm but it was
with apple it was like logo did you
ever play logo like use logo
I think so.
It was like the little turtle.
So it's instructions and stuff.
So like I basically built animations with
the thing and then the animations would
control.
Like I had like a hydroplane one year.
So we had like a tub with water
and it had propellers.
One year was like a Ferris wheel and
all that stuff.
So I would have the animation control the
real thing.
It's like a radio interview at some point
about it.
So yeah,
I did that.
Then I went to high school.
And in high school,
I kind of fell off for a bit.
I did some basic and some three D
stuff, but a bit of web.
I missed my calling.
Like I read all these people that got
into web early and I was just like
not really into it and all that.
And then college was like computer
engineering.
So it was more hardware.
I did the more computer science option,
but I didn't do that much programming.
I kind of fell off for a little
bit.
And then I came back to it.
Like my first job was in the law
firm.
Like I did like,
I did sysadmin stuff for a law firm
and then I started building tools for
them.
Like, um,
And that's actually a really important
point is I love building tools,
which is a bit like how the serverless
and a lot of my projects have gone.
But I like building tools and I just
realized that I like programming.
So I went back into it and that's
been the journey.
Well, not quite.
I did agency,
then I was going to do MBA.
Then I realized I like programming more
than being a business person.
So I went back.
But I always joke because I applied to
Harvard and Stanford and all those places
because I had pretty high grades,
but I didn't get in.
And I'm glad that I didn't basically.
It would have been a very different life
for me.
And I like programming too much to get.
So anyways, it always drives me back.
That's like the kind of...
that's like kind of my journey it's always
like i try to get off like i
i kind of get dragged out of programming
in some way and my heart is really
in it and it's like i just kind
of follow my heart a lot in my
life and it just brings me back here
that's why i love the wordpress community
i started teaching programming even though
like a lot of the stuff i was
teaching was very high end
um from the get-go like i was just
you know i used to have these slides
that were like you lost me at hi
i'm carl you know which was like the
first slide and i was just it was
just there to be like ask questions don't
be intimidated yeah i'm like a lot of
people are here are self-taught um and
don't have like a former computer science
background and i'm just here to like
explain things to you like how to do
them how to do them differently um in
a way that makes sense because a lot
of the problem with object-oriented
programming and wordpress was just that
people would try to implement things like
classes and then they didn't really
understand why classes exists
had to use them and,
or like what they were supposed to do
and they would make stuff.
And then they were like, well,
this doesn't feel good.
And also like,
I don't feel like it helps.
And it didn't because they weren't,
and it wasn't their fault.
Right.
Like it was just like WordPress is largely
procedural.
So, and trying to,
repackage this in a more object-oriented
way requires a lot of high-level
architectural thinking.
That is hard.
Like,
it's like when you use a framework like
Symphony or Laravel,
a lot of that thinking is done for
you.
You have like all the primitives that you
can use and you don't have that with
WordPress.
So I was teaching you how to build
these primitives that I still use today.
Like, like Emir, my serverless platform,
like has a plugin and it's all object
oriented programming,
but it's using all stuff that's like,
from years ago like uh wp rocket uses
like i have code attributed to me and
wp rocket because it's just like it's a
primitive like that is good and doesn't
really need anything else like it's just
it's been good for like almost a decade
and it's still good because it solves the
problem in a in an elegant and clean
way and you just keep using it so
that was a lot of sorry i like
I'm like the master of going on tangents.
This is great.
This is what we're about.
I'm happy to go on tangents.
I will circle back.
Okay.
I wanted to ask about,
you said when you went to do computer
engineering,
you were thinking more hardware and not
software.
Where did you see that going?
Or did you see that going?
Is that just an interesting thing at the
time?
Or did you actually have...
Like when I graduate,
maybe I'll do this thing.
I mean, there was so, I mean,
nobody ever, it was such a different time.
Like, so for context,
I graduated computer engineering in
twenty, two thousand six.
So twenty years ago, I should have gone.
It's going to be my twenty year reunion
this year.
And back in two thousand six, you know,
like so much of what you can do
today wasn't possible.
Right.
Like, yeah.
if you wanted to work on computer chips,
for example,
like your options were largely just go
work at Intel or like a couple of
like AMD or like, you know, but small,
like there's like,
you couldn't imagine today that you could
just design a chip,
send it to China and get that done,
right?
Like it's just like,
same thing with the treaty printing and
all that stuff.
Like treaty printers were an entire
department budget in two thousand six.
So I loved it,
but it was just like, there was no,
you know, I only know,
I'm sure there's more than one,
but like out of like the circle of
people I know, first of all,
I'm from Montreal.
I didn't study Montreal,
which is very unusual,
but all my friends in Montreal basically
that did engineering,
they all work in the gaming industry
because that's basically where you went
because Montreal is kind of like the
gaming industry mecca,
like almost every large studio has studios
here.
So you basically just everybody went into
that.
But where I went in Kingston,
most people also ended up as software
developers, basically,
because there was just not a lot of
jobs for people that knew how to make
computer chips or all that low level
stuff.
I love compiler class, but it's,
there's no point in building a compiler,
you know, except for fun,
which you can do.
But it was just,
that was like where the careers were.
And for me,
it was even because of the
catch-twenty-two,
I'd already been doing summer jobs for
this law firm.
Right.
And the director already knew me and he's
like, I was like backpacking and he was,
in Europe and he was just like, well,
do you want to come work for us?
And I was like, sure.
I don't really know what else I'm going
to do.
So that seemed fine.
I wasn't going to do tech support.
I was going to be with the back
end server people.
So I was going to be kind of
level two support.
I would do some infra and all that
stuff, which was interesting.
So I was like, okay,
But it was not clear what you could
do.
One of my housemates was in computer
science.
He's freaking brilliant.
He basically started at Google that year.
He's still at Google.
But outside of that,
most people didn't really know where to
go.
Computer software wasn't that big yet,
even on its own.
But it was just like, okay, well,
Montreal had a lot of video game studios.
So the computer engineers went to the
video game studios and
I wasn't that interested in video games.
I did my computer.
I did computer graphics thinking I would
like computer graphics.
And as gifted and brilliant as I am,
my only class that I almost failed was
linear algebra.
and basically computer graphics is all
linear algebra it's all like matrices and
matrix transforms and all that stuff and
that's the course i almost failed so so
i was like and and i almost failed
the computer graphics course so i was like
there's just no way i'm going into video
games i mean i still dream of making
a video game but
you know it was just not realistic at
the time so there's enough things now
there's enough tools that you don't have
to worry about the graphics part anymore
no exactly and i was just not involved
in web like like i just didn't do
any web you didn't do web at school
right yeah like my exposure was java and
i did some c sharp basically like some
dot net true like going to like clubs
and stuff like that but it was it
was just very little like my summer job
was like
I did a summer job for the Canadian
government, and that was still Java,
like Tomcat servers.
It didn't make web look fun at all,
right?
No.
So I really missed the boat on that.
Looking back at everybody's retrospective,
you read about DHH and a lot of
these people,
they just got into the web really early.
And I just didn't get the right exposure
for that.
So it just never kind of appealed to
me until actually I got to WordPress.
WordPress is how I got into web
development.
That's a pretty fascinating introduction.
Yeah.
um yeah no i i uh i rode
the geocities wave uh i was big on
geocities i had a handful of of dumb
little sites and then i started uh because
i was uh involved in the san francisco
sort of goth community and that was all
sort of like bbs's and uh irc actually
it's pre-irc uh like message boards and
and uh there was um
there was a sfgoth.net was sort of like
the hub and i knew the the guy
that ran it and i got a i
was able to get a page on that
and that was sort of like my first
real non-geocities site um yeah
And back then, it was like,
if you wanted to do something functional,
it was like, well, here's a Perl script,
or here's like a CGI bin or something
that you can drop into your site and
it will maybe do something useful,
which was not very fun at all.
And I also, and I never, yeah,
that was not a thing that I...
could see myself writing,
even though I did take a couple
programming classes in college, but yeah,
I was mostly self-taught.
And that actually segues into,
you've taught and you've wrote a book.
Tell me about how that sort of started
and came to be.
Oh my goodness.
Okay.
Well, we'll have to drill a bit back.
So, so I started doing web development.
I got hired as the first,
basically like this agency was like being
hired to like make a website for,
I was trying to hire,
I was trying to apply for a.net position.
And then funny enough,
like everybody thinks I'm like great at
programming,
but I could not pass a programming
interview to save my life.
Basically.
Like I was just like,
you know like i would kill the soft
skill stuff we'd talk everything's great
they're just like i even applied to
ubisoft that way it was like they're like
cool we just need to make you pass
uh like a quick exam and then you
will probably be good to go and i
was like oh no i'll never hear from
you again basically uh and um so i
applied for this.net position and they
were like uh
you're kind of weak, but you know,
we have,
do you know anything about WordPress or
something like that?
I was like, no,
but I don't learn anything.
Like that's what I was telling.
And.
so so that got me involved in in
wordpress and then i did my first word
camp uh and then i started organizing them
and doing meetups so that's like kind of
how i got into it but i was
really already really into symphony um at
the time you know it was still symphony
one but symphony two was coming out which
is wild like symphony two must be fifteen
years old actually like something crazy um
and uh
But it came out,
they had all this component system.
I loved it.
And I could just see architecturally like
how this could fit.
So it was just like,
and then I would talk to people and
they're like, oh, you can't do object.
Like you probably remember those like,
you know, an advanced WordPress group.
Ah,
you can't do object oriented programming
with WordPress.
Ah, you can't do this.
And I was just like, no, you can.
It's hard.
It's legitimately hard because you don't
have the primitives.
You don't have the components like
Symphony built and stuff like that.
So you have to think really harder about
how to do stuff.
And so I just started doing that.
I just started teaching that.
And then at the same time,
I quit my job after two years and
not getting the MBA.
And I just realized I wanted to be
on my own and start my own business.
This is going to tie to the serverless
stuff because I'm still on that journey.
But basically,
I started the journey to just start my
own business.
And I was like, okay,
how am I going to do this?
And then I was just like,
I guess I wanted to do.
So my first thing was to do,
I really like another special interest of
mine is like fitness science and stuff.
So I wanted to do like a health
app.
I actually had health.
It was called health,
but the old English way of spending it.
It's like H-E-L-T-H-E, I think.
Okay.
And then that kind of bombed.
I couldn't get any traction on that
because I'm a noob, basically,
and I suck at marketing.
But then I was like,
I wanted to build.
Sentry was new then.
Everybody knows Sentry then,
but I wanted to build Sentry for
WordPress.
Uh, so I, I rebranded it to help.
And then I was like, okay,
I'm going to,
there's still blogs on that in my,
on my, on my blog.
So I was like,
I'm going to start blogging about
WordPress tech stuff and hopefully that'll
take off.
But it, it never really did for,
for very obvious reasons,
even century and the WordPress space is
now, even after all this time,
it's not that big.
Um, yeah.
But because back then people were like,
is that like New Relic?
I'm like, it's not quite.
It's hard to explain to people like error
reporting and all that stuff.
But that was like the catalyst.
The catalyst was always like,
I want to be self-sufficient on my own
because all I want to do is write
code.
and feel financially safe writing code.
That's like,
that's like my North star basically.
Like my entire career is like,
I just want to write code and feel
safe, uh, doing it.
And so I started writing all that.
And then I just decided why not write
a book?
You know,
I had this book and sign up sheet.
Cause I was trying to all the hacks,
like the, the,
the
growth hacks and i was just i had
the and then at some point if i
got enough people signed up for the book
i'd start writing it and i i did
and i published it and it did shockingly
well like i think the lifetime sales of
it is like thirty two thousand dollars
like for it's not nothing yeah for a
niche right book on how to do object
it's not even how to do object-oriented
programming
in wordpress it's like it's just
object-oriented programming like the
concept taught with like wordpress as
examples like as opposed to the like you
know class vehicle car extends vehicle and
all this stuff that's like really kind of
like not useful like i would use a
lot of like wordpress stuff to do to
to do the examples uh but it's to
me it's still wild to this day that
it
like dead that well.
Yeah.
No, for context,
like I did for a number of years,
I was making online tutorials for
Pluralsight.
Pluralsight has a library of video courses
that you can take.
And a lot of the people,
they refer to the people that do their
courses as authors.
And all of them actually are also like
written authors.
And so I've had conversations with some of
the other Pluralsight authors about who
have written books and they're like, yeah,
the money like it's really just marketing.
Like,
I don't make anything off of this book,
even though my name is on a book
and it's like maybe the Amazon bestseller
in its category of like some niche,
like specific computer technical thing.
But they're not making a ton of money
on it,
and especially because it goes through
like O'Reilly or something.
So like they're taking their cut.
But like
They,
what it's basically just name recognition.
Like they can say,
I have a book and then also you
can take this class with me here.
And they're actually,
they're saying that they're making a lot
more in royalties from Pearl site stuff,
uh, than they were from their book.
And that's why they kept doing it is
because they, because that's,
that's where more money was coming in and
they had a really good sort of revenue
sharing model.
Yeah.
I self published.
because there was all this self publishing
at the time, like nature,
I was using kit, uh, Nathan Berry, Adam,
what tan had like refactoring to
collections.
That was like an awesome book.
Um,
like I just went to self publishing or
I've made more money than a lot of
people I know that have published on
Amazon and stuff like,
like not like a bit, like, you know,
three, four times more, you know, um,
and yeah it's i mean it was all
marketing for it like it was just like
content marketing all this stuff that
doesn't work as well anymore uh but it
was just like it was just you know
marketing works when you have a place and
this i owe to like matt cromwell basically
like uh like matt cromwell
was like uh the admin of like advanced
wordpress group and and he found my stuff
and he started sharing it and then he
was like no you can public you can
you can promote yourself here you can you
used to have a wizard for like whether
you should post or not and there was
an actual answer that was like if you're
carl alexander it's okay basically like
you're like
there's like that's how like he was a
real ally uh at that time and i
think that's one of my struggles now
around marketing um is those spaces don't
really exist like i mean but you know
people say x you know is is good
for for that stuff but like i've been
going back a bit and i just
There's so much noise.
It doesn't feel very good to me.
I know some people have a lot of
success on it,
but it doesn't feel like it.
I really liked feeling like I was part
of it.
That's why I try to do a Discord.
I've been talking to a lot of other
companies, try to do a Discord,
build your community on Discord.
so that you have a place you know
that people can come chat like that's
always been my hope for like emir is
to just have a active Discord where people
can come chat and talk not just about
serverless stuff they can talk about
programming stuff for like anything they
find cool um and just build that out
somehow but but that's missing nowadays
like because to me there was like um
Amy Hoy is her name.
She used to have,
I forget what the course was,
but basically she would talk about sales
safari.
You have to find where your people hang
out.
And I just don't know where my people
hang out anymore because most of us don't
really want to hang out on the social
networks anymore.
We're kind of like post status slack and
a couple of things,
but it doesn't have the same stuff that
back in the day
I could go on Reddit or... I mean,
Reddit's still good-ish,
but I just don't go on the WordPress.
I'll be honest.
I don't go on much on Reddit,
but I think they're still good.
But it's just...
There's no more advanced WordPress group.
I don't want to be on Facebook anyways.
So it's just...
So it's difficult, you know,
but at the time it was great.
Like, you know,
it allowed me to achieve something
significant.
But it was like what to transition.
Once that ended,
that's kind of like the year the book
came out.
It's kind of like when I transitioned to
the serverless stuff,
the timing was just coincidental.
But it was just like I was ready
for the next thing.
And that ended up being the next thing,
you know.
Yeah.
And then COVID happened,
which also threw a lot of wrenches and
everything.
So it might have been a different
trajectory if it was not for COVID.
But that's also a part of the issue,
too.
It's hard to do marketing when a lot
of it was me going to conferences,
talking to people.
And that's still a lot of my best
networking.
My best growth comes from that.
I still publish a lot.
I mean, for the readers,
for the listeners, like Emir, my business,
like I've been writing a report every two
weeks to four,
between two and four weeks for five years.
Like I've written ninety four or ninety
five of them, basically.
Like it's going to be the five year
anniversary in February, basically.
So I've been sharing in public my
struggles, my this, my that,
like very honestly,
like I had an interview.
It's not out yet with Nadine from LightWP
Build.
And he's like, you know,
like you and Katie key are like very
down to earth,
but you're like so much rougher.
Like I was just like, cause it's hard.
People should know it's, it's hard.
Like, I,
I don't want people to be like, Oh,
like you were kind of a overnight success
or stuff.
I'm like, there was no overnight.
Like I've been working on this since
twenty nineteen and I, you know,
and it's still not, you know, it's still,
it's still hard, you know?
And I think people should,
should know that.
And,
and be clear eyed about it.
I think that's always been really
important to me.
like same thing when I did a pressonomics
conference too on stuff that was like
that.
And it was just like talking about success
and what success means to people.
And I think you have to be like
honest, you know?
Because otherwise like people just see
what you decide to show them.
And I can't show a hundred percent and
that's not the point.
But the point is like,
if you don't show the real difficult
stuff,
you know, people just think it's easy,
you know, and it's, it's really not,
you know, like, it's really not easy to,
yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, there's so much,
there's so much surface,
the social media tends to highlight the,
the good stuff and creates this sort of
like almost fake version of, of everyone,
which is, I think it's,
it's a reason why I don't, uh,
spend as much time as i used to
on on social media yeah i mean it's
been good like there's a there's a you
know it's like i've talked about it like
not like written or anything but i've
talked a bit about it like informally it's
just like it sucks that like the right
thing to do for marketing hurts you so
much yeah
And I don't know how to deal with
that basically.
I kind of, I'm still avoiding it,
but it's,
it's one of the challenges that I find
with the whole thing is that I know,
like,
you don't need to convince me that if
I was really active on LinkedIn or on,
on X or blue sky or choose your,
you know,
or everything that it would probably be
good for the business,
but
What is the cost that I'm willing to
bear on this?
And it's, it's hard, you know, like it's,
you know, I've, I've,
I talk a lot about what are you
willing, like,
You know, I really want, like,
if it's not clear,
I've been doing this for fifteen years on
my own,
trying to build a business that is for
me.
And I still haven't quite,
I feel like I'm the closest I've ever
been, but I still have not succeeded.
you know i'm willing to take the loss
you know i like what is the cost
that you're willing to bear to get that
success and that was kind of like the
pressonomics thing was just like what is
what is the cost you're willing to bear
are you willing to take all this you
know
crap that you have to see and deal
with on social media to be successful
obviously you know some people manage
better than others but i just find that
it triggers my adhd uh like i scroll
i just it's distracting you know um
You just see a lot of stuff you'd
rather not see.
It's very hard, right?
And it's not because I don't like the
people there.
There's not good people that I would love
to interact with,
but the blast radius of the whole thing
is huge.
So it's difficult for me.
So I write a lot and I publish
a lot.
That's why I like newsletters and stuff
because you get to opt in.
to to seeing it and you know like
the reports aren't that popular like i
started with two hundred fifty people i
think i'm around around two hundred people
are falling off but again part of it
is just i'm writing it for me yeah
part of the reason too like you should
do a lot if you do a lot
of stuff for you maybe you'll be
successful maybe you won't but at least
you know i think
you'll never look at yourself in the
mirror and be like, oh, like I didn't,
I wasn't true to myself,
which is like really critical for me.
So it's just like,
but that's a very hard tension right now
is how to do that.
Cause I find the cost is high.
Yeah, for sure.
Let's talk about Amir.
We've been dancing around it long enough.
For anyone who doesn't know and hasn't
gone to one of your talks,
explain what serverless is for somebody
who doesn't know anything about
serverless.
Yeah.
What does it mean?
What is serverless?
I could get into the technical weeds.
I think
I don't think what's I don't think this
is like what's changed a lot this year
is I've just kind of refined a lot.
I'm thinking a lot.
I'm branching out into all of PHP.
That's my plan.
And I've just been trying to get to
the root.
I used to be, again, autistic,
super technical.
You love the technical aspect.
But really,
what is the point of serverless?
First, yes,
there are servers with serverless.
That is not the point.
I'll just tackle this right away because I
think it's important.
But the point with serverless is that we
all know about servers.
We know they exist and stuff like that.
it's about your sphere of concern, right?
Like how much do you want to care
about servers?
Do you want to be able to SSH
into it and do all this stuff?
Do you want to like have to just
do all this manual work?
Do you want to know how much RAM
you need, how many CPUs you need?
Do you want to know about all these
things?
Do you want to care about all these
things?
And the answer is like increasingly,
this is what's changed this year,
is the answer is no, basically.
The answer is increasingly no.
And it's increasingly no across the entire
spectrum of people,
not just like the non-technical people who
obviously like have no interest.
They never wanted to care about it.
Exactly.
They never wanted to care about it in
the first place.
Uh,
they don't know what it means when they
get to the, like, you know,
pricing page and they look, okay,
I have these CPUs here and this and
worker PHP workers.
Like, what does this all mean?
Or like in the case of Pantheon,
like how many app servers do I get?
And like all this stuff,
like they don't want it,
but now like in my,
my new talk that like the re re
reworked talk that I do, like I,
I talk about the Vercel experience.
And I gave that talk at CloudFest and
there was like these young developers in
the back and they were nodding so hard
that their head would fall off basically.
Cause it's the same thing with developers.
Like developers nowadays don't,
they don't wanna know about this stuff.
They've just wanna deploy code.
Like, you know,
like what I use in my talk is
like, you know, deploy scale and sleep.
That's it.
Like when you deploy in Vercel,
the only time you have to worry with
anything is if AWS is going down,
basically, right?
And even Vercel is doing a better job
at handling that, but it's still like,
you know, you have your life,
you have your obviously issues,
but nobody's going to be super upset at
you if AWS goes down and you go
down at the same time because the entire
internet's on fire anyway.
You might not even be able to message
in Slack, like the whole thing.
Like, it's just like, so...
If that's your only time that you might
have a downtime, that is very appealing.
This is a much better appealing thing than
being like, oh,
I was on the front page of Reddit
and then my site blew up.
I don't know what's happening.
It was my lightning in a bottle moment
and the whole thing.
So serverless...
addresses that problem basically and
that's like that's me giving you the high
level uh if you like if you want
i could we could talk about the more
technical reasons but at the high level
that's the idea of serverless and that's
like what's changed a lot this year in
ways that i that have shocked me is
just that how fast the transitions happen
but it's just like
You know,
just people just don't want to have to
deal with that stuff anymore.
Like I never like I started working on
it because I didn't want to deal with
it.
And I used to joke in my my
early iterations of the talk,
I should be like the last person to
promote this stuff because I know servers.
I've been assistant men for like at the
time, twenty years or something, you know,
like like I know this stuff inside out,
but I don't.
I don't want to be on pager duty,
you know,
like coming up in Montreal and I rebranded
the title.
But it's like how to it's basically that
it's like how to not be on pager
duty.
Like,
I don't want to be on pager duty
since I've I've switched to this stuff.
Like,
I've never had to worry about anything,
you know.
And to me, that is very, very,
very important.
It's priceless in a way that you can't
cost it.
I talk about that too.
You have to be intellectually honest about
this stuff.
Yes,
you could go and fix the thing if
you're comfortable with servers,
but even if you're not, it's just like,
okay,
you're paying five dollars for a
DigitalOcean droplet.
But, you know,
how much is it worth it to, like,
deal with, like, oh,
the SSL certificate broke at some point.
Or, like, I have to migrate, like,
you know,
your Linux versions out of date or this
or that, you know.
I had to go down a rabbit hole
on my DigitalOcean droplet,
which my site's still on, because...
I installed a plugin that required PHP
eight point something, right?
And my server was still on seven point
four because I never touch it.
And so then I had to like do
all those things like there's all those
things that I don't want to think about,
like go into the server,
SSH into the server,
do do an upgrade on the operating system.
Then that broke a whole bunch of other
shit on my website.
And like there's a whole like rabbit hole
involved in things that and at the end
of it, I was like, you know,
had i already had in like migrated this
site to pantheon or something else yeah i
wouldn't have to worry about any of this
like just like click a button and then
it would have the new version and it
would be done yeah so hosting solves some
of these problems but it doesn't solve the
the scaling one which is like
The scaling one is still a very big
problem.
And again,
I'm talking to a lot of executives,
not just developers and stuff like that.
That one is a huge problem still.
you know,
there was like early on with Ymir,
like there was a,
they don't exist anymore,
but I was just like, there was like,
there was a customer that was on Pantheon
and Matt Chaney was like,
get them off of me.
Like, I was just like,
cause they were just this crazy
WooCommerce site.
And it was just like,
they were already on the biggest custom
thing that you could do.
And you hear these stories all the time,
right?
Like my favorite one from WordCamp Canada
is like,
this guy who sells, I shit you not,
a hundred thousand dollars a month of
worms.
I think I remember this story.
Yeah.
And, and it's like,
and he's just a farmer.
Like he's just like,
like he just wants to sell his work.
He doesn't understand why.
And he shouldn't, you know,
but that's why kind of Shopify and Wix
and Squarespace kind of win in that
respect because they absorb all of that
scaling issue.
Yeah.
I mean, so when I was at CloudFest,
I talked with some executives and they
call it like the SaaSification of hosting,
which is like kind of a weird term
to use because most people think of SaaS
as like the pay per month thing.
But what they mean is like when you
pay for a SaaS,
you never worry if the SaaS is going
to go down or not.
right?
Like you pay and it just absorbs the
traffic, right?
And that's it, right?
Like if you go,
if you make it on the front page
of Reddit, like, you know,
the platform's going to handle it and the
whole thing, right?
So they meant it more in that scenario,
right?
But that's kind of like where the customer
expectations are going, right?
Like they just don't want...
So that's why like the serverless stuff is
just like a technological solution to
offering...
that peace of mind that people want.
And you bring up good points too,
which is like one of the things that
I'm focusing on versus a lot of the,
like there's breath and there's Laravel
vapor.
Although like that product is kind of
dying.
Like Taylor's really focused on Laravel
cloud,
but I support PHP seven point two to
one.
I'm gonna start working on eight point
five right now, but it's like,
I don't do eight point five yet,
but basically,
And it's funny because I did a lunch
and learn with AWS and somebody asked me
if I could support five point six,
you know, like,
but there's something about also having
kind of like safe environment where you
can just run an old piece of code
indefinitely, basically.
And that's again,
that's the kind of promise for like the
techie people is again.
Deploy scale sleep, like,
you just it's deployed if it works when
you deployed it, it will keep working.
Indefinitely, you know, like,
that's kind of like the promise of the
whole.
Technology is to do that obviously there's
like challenges to to the whole thing,
but.
because nothing's free,
like everything has trade-offs,
but that's kind of like the idea.
It's like, oh, like,
or if you need to upgrade, well,
it's like simple,
like any hosting company.
Okay, I need to bump it up.
But I think what's getting more
challenges,
if you want to maintain an old code
base and keep it safe, you know,
there's like the security aspect of the
platform too, which is like,
a lot more secure than something you would
have with like traditional like server
hosting.
So if you wanted to keep a seven
point two site or a five point six
site up,
like there's a lot of security issues that
you have to mitigate.
This makes it a lot easier to do
to like take out a whole category of
them as well.
Yeah.
So it's just it's just that's the idea
of serverless like at the high level,
like what the product does is just like
it lets you connect.
It's kind of like spin up WP.
You connect your AWS account.
Like I'll manage it.
You can deploy to it.
Now, basically I have an agreement with,
uh, built fast, which is like a,
like a partnership with them,
which is like, they, um,
they're going to build hosting around
this.
So, cause I never wanted to do hosting.
So per se.
So it was just like,
so it was great that I found business
partners that wanted to bring that and
like resell it to other hosting companies.
Like we have a bunch of,
people that are like companies that are
waiting to to get their hands on it
um and but that's like the idea is
that safety that like peace of mind and
that scalability because people are just
not down they don't want to show up
on a pricing page and hear about ram
php workers cpus and stuff like that they
just wanted to and even like the
woocommerce stuff is not even
useful, like, sorry,
I'm going to a little rant,
but it's just a lot of,
a lot of these pricing pages,
they're like, okay,
we can handle like one, you know,
let's say X amount of checkouts per hour
or something like that.
But like,
what if those checkouts are in the next
five minutes?
Right?
Like, you're not, there's no safe, like,
it's just, it's very opaque, you know,
and people are just, like,
not down with that.
That's why, like, people are just, okay,
well, why am I dealing with this?
I'll just go pay Shopify, you know?
And then I'll handle all the traffic,
you know, that I can, you know,
I won't have to worry about it.
So like offer like it's a real threat
because it's, you know,
there's other vectors as well,
like lovable and like just being able to
build a site and deploy it and just
like.
cool, it just stays there and it'll scale,
handle all of that,
how to have this kind of experience.
So there's a lot of attacks on different
vectors around it.
But at the end of the day,
people just don't want to...
We're at a point now,
I think a critical point,
where the idea of a server is just
not something people want to read about in
a pricing page at all.
Yeah.
Like...
Unless you're an enterprise client or
something like that.
But for most of what WordPress sells,
they're not the people that want to hear
about that.
They want a site and they want to
pay X amount a month for their site
and understand where the costs are going
to come from.
know that it'll stay up if something crazy
happens and you go viral or or all
that stuff yeah yeah for sure um well
thank you so much uh carl for being
on uh we could talk forever uh yeah
i know we actually have yeah um i
was uh happy to finally get a chance
to hang out in canada um yes last
year um but for everyone else who's coming
across this uh either audio or video
Where can they find you online and where
can they learn more about Amir or what
you're doing or where you might be
speaking?
Yeah, I mean,
I am mostly active on LinkedIn a bit,
but carlalexander.ca is where I write.
I mostly write my year in review.
My current one's in progress right now.
And then emirapp.com is the website for
that.
And then if you,
there's like slash reports, slash public,
like I have a public dashboard and stuff
to see how the business is going and
all of that.
That's awesome.
Yeah,
I really love the transparency of that
too.
Yeah, I try.
Well, thanks a lot for having me on,
Chris.
Yeah, thank you again.
And for everyone on the internet,
we'll see you next time.