Something Old, Something New, Something Blue [Series Intro]

As I've explained in the introductory blog post Here be dragons [intro post], I've been postponing this blog for years because I've thought that only "epic" posts are worth posting.

Sometimes I'm having trouble finding a middle ground with some subjects, so I tend to go to "extremes" or better said complete opposites.

A complete opposite to an "epic" post, at least in my view, is a short step by step tutorial post about something that takes less to "click through" than to read the steps. So I've decided to start this blog with a series of posts such as that. They're going to be short, they're going to be step by step, they're going to cover really small topics to be modular, with the idea of connecting them into systems that make sense, and linking them in posts as "steps".

Throughout the years I've been building tools/functions/procedures to make my life easier. Some of them made me more responsive to my clients, some allowed me to trigger some events easily and remotely, etc.

This series will focus on things that I've built to ease communication.

As I'll be writing those posts, I'll be linking them here to have them all at one place.

• Deserialize JSON from an HTTP(S) request body for further use in Azure Logic Apps
• Send an SMS using Nexmo and Azure Logic Apps
• Azure Logic Apps as a proxy that throttles the number of parallel HTTP(S) requests to a service

What does the title mean?

Modern communication is performed over the Internet, which is totally fine if you have a smartphone with a reliable Internet connection 24/7. In cases when you don't have a reliable Internet connection, or you leave your smartphone at home, and take your "dumb" phone with you into the woods, Internet stops being an option.

"Something old" represents old communication channels (SMS, phone calls, and the "newest" of them all - e-mail), and some horrendous legacy APIs. Consider yourself lucky for not having to read about fax machines! Although, one day I might write a blog post about integrating them into modern cloud systems...

"Something new" represents serverless, and in these posts serverless will mostly mean Azure Logic Apps, although there will be some Azure Functions, and even Durable Functions.

"Something blue" is Azure <3

I know that I'm missing "something borrowed", but let's say that I've borrowed some time from my family time to develop those helpers and write these blog posts so that you won't have to!