vital101

I've been fiddling with a long-term niche product for WordPress plugin and theme updates. It's 10(!) years old this year. Working in a code base that old 100% of my own commits is both amazing and terrifying. Past me was not as experienced at current me :)

https://kernl.us

SpotOn | Senior Software Engineer (Fullstack) | Full-time | Remote (US)

We're building the restaurant operating system of the future! From point of sale systems to labor management, come help us make restaurants easier to operate..

Role Overview:

As a Senior Software Engineer at SpotOn, you'll be working with the Teamwork team to help build the future of restaurant labor management.

Responsibilities:

- Develop, test, and deploy our legacy PHP monolith. - Decompose our PHP monolith and extract into our Laravel API.

Requirements:

- Proven experience as a Senior Software Engineer - Ability to understand business requirements and translate them into technical requirements.

Nice to Have:

- Startup experience. - Experience in Fintech or Restaurant tech.

What’s on Offer:

- A competitive compensation package. - RSUs - Fully remote

How to Apply: Email your resume, a brief introduction, and relevant portfolio or GitHub links to jack.slingerland@spoton.com. Mention you saw this on HN.

Are there any Raspberry Pi competitors that people like? I've see a few referenced in different articles but I don't have any idea how reliable or useful they are.

I don't see the "Engineering Director, Frontend" position on the hiring site. Is it still available?

This is similar to how developing with VSCode is on Windows + WSL.

The article mentions that they use minimal cells. "Minimal cells are simpler than naturally occurring ones, making them easier to recreate digitally."

I personally wouldn't build my own infrastructure. I'd use something like https://convesio.com/ and let them handle the scaling.

I've been using Django with Vue sprinkled in on https://candid.work and it's been a pleasure. Using Vue for reactive stuff and then modifying form fields after the changes so Django can still do the updates has been a pretty great experience so far.

Kernl (https://kernl.us) - WordPress Plugin/Theme Updates, Git Deployment, Analytics, Load Testing, etc.

Currently around $1200/month with fairly linear growth. It's a fun project to work on and I get to make money on the side for doing it.

Zero to IPO in five years. Well done team Slack!

I made https://kernl.us solo and it's making ~$1100 MRR and growing.

It isn't quite the same, but I've had great luck with a combination of VS Live Share (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliv...) and then Zoom or some other tool for voice communication.

Back when I was in middle school I used a copy FrontPage 98 at school to generate frames for my Star Wars site and then finished up the rest at home with FrontPage Express. A few years ago I restored the site after finding a broken version of it on the WayBack machine.

http://re-cycledair.com/starwars/Entrance.html

I've been working on https://kernl.us for a little over 2 years now.

It's currently making $650 / month and growing.

Something I "knew" but never really understood about growing a business is how long it can take. Granted this is completely on the side, but it still takes a long time to find your market, grow, get customers, etc. Learning that this is actually a marathon was valuable.

The other thing I have to actively manage is building things that are valuable -vs- things that I find interesting. As a developer I LOVE tinkering with new technology, but when I'm wearing my business hat upgrading to the new hot frontend framework doesn't make that much sense.

Many years ago when I was still a PHP + Wordpress developer, I discovered that getting updates to private plugins and themes was a huge pain.

Fast-forward a few years and I finally built out https://kernl.us as a learning project (Mongo, Node.js, Angular). It's mostly passive income now, pulling in ~$450 per month.

I started https://kernl.us last May and brought it out of beta in January. I've been growing at the rate of around 5 new paying customers a month.

After the closed beta I started out with about $140 / month in profits, which has grown to $330 / month over time. The growth rate has been pretty steady, but nothing so large that I could go full time on it.

I build a developer tool for premium plugin / theme authors in the Wordpress ecosystem. If you can build something that scratches an itch in a programming ecosystem, people are likely to pay for it.

Although with the amount of work I do on it, I'm not sure I'd call it passive ;)

I just finished the work today of migrating from Mandrill to SendGrid. I can't speak for the other providers, but so far it has been a fairly painless process. The client libraries for Node are similar enough between the two that I didn't have to put a ton of thought into refactoring.

Private Wordpress Plugin & Theme updates + CI services - https://kernl.us

It's awesome because I get to work on fun technologies (MEAN stack), learn how to scale Node.js, and interact with a great community. Also, I have paying customers which makes it even better :)

Thats a good point. If I can differentiate the plans more, charging more becomes a lot easier. +1 to grandfathering existing users.

Yes, thats correct. I initially priced this based on what others in the industry were pricing. I think eventually I'll experiment with pricing a little bit, but I'm worried that with higher prices developers will just say "Meh, I can implement this myself" and go the other direction.

Thanks for the response (and critique). I think you're probably right. Unless this can target a much larger part of the Wordpress development community, it probably won't attract VCs.

We make it pretty easy to do with Kernl. It also supports "push to build" from GitHub or BitBucket if that interests you. If you have any questions send me an email: jack at kernl dot us

I started working on getting my private Wordpress plugin and theme update service out of beta. It's getting closer! Maybe by the end of the month.

https://kernl.us - Come check us out!

Thanks for the reply. You make good points. I imagine I'll end up doing a lot of A/B testing on pricing to see what sticks the best.

I'm working on private hosted Wordpress plugin and theme updates. My goal is to do for Wordpress updates what Github did for Git.

Its currently in a private alpha, but I've already got 26 users signed up! I have lots of ideas for doing automated builds, webhooks, and third party integrations, but the going is slow because I lack a lot of time to work on it.

Check it out at https://kernl.us

Central Michigan University

Back in grad school we used the Inferno OS as a learning tool. I don't remember too much about it, but I do remember using Limbo (precursor to Golang) and liking it quite a lot. When Go came out it was really easy to pick up due to my time mucking around Inferno using Limbo.

Congrats on 800 sign ups, thats huge! I agree with you on aggressively tracking metrics, although I think I need a bit more than 20 users for my alpha. Its nice to have a concrete number to compare against, even if we aren't in related niches.