The Changelog - April 2026

March and April in a nutshell: Migrating hosting, scripting deployments, and letting Claude PM my side projects

Missed the March update due to a mix of school holidays and not much progress, so this update covers March and April.

The Statistics

Revenue

Goal: £1,000 MMR

Followers

Am I missing something? What other statistics would you like to see?

Hosting Migration

My AWS starter credits have recently expired, so I'm having to pay my own hosting bill again. This has prompted me to migrate from AWS back to Digital Ocean, which is a bit cheaper, simpler to set up, aligning better with Scaffold and my side projects, as they typically require a straightforward LAMP stack. I've only got a partial migration done so far, so I'm split over AWS & Digital Ocean and I'm migrating the more costly elements first.

New Product - Scaffold Deploy

Previously, migrations have been ad hoc and unstructured, and if I had to do it unplanned and in an emergency, it would take me a while to get my sites back up and running. This migration gave me the perfect opportunity to consider disaster recovery and script much of the server setup and application deployment so it's reproducible, i.e. with it now scripted, I can spin up replacement servers and hotswap the reserved IP to the new server, and it should just work (in theory - not attempted this yet though).

This scripted setup has revealed a new product for Scaffold, which I'm calling "Scaffold Deploy". I am going to create a GitHub template repo with the scripts I use to manage my servers. This will allow me to reposition Scaffold as "Scaffold Build" so the toolset is now "Scaffold Build" to develop your side projects and "Scaffold Deploy" to put them into production.

This repositioning should allow me to build out a bigger suite of tools, i.e. "Scaffold Launchpad" - checklists and tools for launching your project etc.

Claude

I had a long chat with Claude about my side project portfolio, to try and help me prioritise what I work on and stay focused on the right things. After about 25 years of tinkering on side projects with little focus or clear direction (and even less revenue - read as 25 years of £0), I really want to turn things around and earn a little from my side projects. I did stress to Claude that although one of the big goals is to achieve some sort of revenue, another important one is that I still enjoy the work. If I don't enjoy the work, then I'm never going to be able to hit the revenue goal.

Following that conversation, Claude has been quite clear with where to spend my time and where to remove distractions/cut my losses.

At this point, I'm using Claude more as a project manager/soundinb board rather than to do coding i.e. identifying what needs to be done for the next week, breaking work down into manageable tasks, flagging up any content that would be good for a blog article. So far it's going well, and I've achieved more in the last week than I have in the last month.

My initial goal is to achieve £20 MMR, which will allow me to pay for a Claude Pro subscription to help speed up writing my documentation for Scaffold and verify that the code is doing what the documentation is saying. Hopefully, I hit that soon and before Anthropic removes Claude Code from the £20 a month subscription, and I have to adjust the goal to £100 MMR.

Blog post

• No progress this month

Documentation

• No progress this month

Originally published at https://chrisshennan.com/blog/the-changelog-april-2026