Automating your business or personal life in 2016

I've always had a warm fuzzy feeling when it comes to automating things and in the recent years I've seen a new type of developer service gaining traction that makes it really ease to automate stuff.

So this was me a few years ago

Hey, I can automate that with this piece of code. It's so easy!

Then as the years went and I grew a beard

Do we really need to write code for this? Why must things be so hard!

Fortunately for us grumps, we no longer have to!

Scott Hanselman was the one to open my eyes to this world. In an excellent video he demonstrates the real life case of an automobile repair shop that wanted to send out an SMS when the car was ready for pickup. They were running a really old system and hiring coders to develop this custom integration would be quite costly to create and maintain.

With a few clicks and drag'n'drop, Scott hooked up an Azure logic app to monitor their SQL database for new rows, and when a Status column changed value to "Done" it would automatically grab the contact info from the same row and send out an SMS to the customer with a personalized message using the customer's name and car model. Not a single code involved, no redeployments of services and immediate business value added to their shop. This is great!

I couldn't find the original video, but here is a similar one.

Automation services

Zapier

supports an impressive 500+ APIs out of the box and has all the popular services you can think of like Facebook, Twitter, Google Drive, Office 365. They recently got support for the much anticipated multi-step and supports scheduling with relative or absolute delays between actions. Their UI used to be real clunky and awkward, but they made great improvements lately.

I still find it disappointing they have a hard limit of scheduling actions more than 1 month into time, which makes it harder to follow up on things like 12 month warranties on purchased products, but with Mandrill's built-in scheduling I can work around that for at least emailing.

Azure logic apps 

is pretty new, but started out great with multi-steps built in from the start. They still don't support scheduling or delays, but I can only imagine this will be added soon. Their API integrations are very limited compared to Zapier, but has great support for Microsoft services and do support generic HTTP request integrations so you can talk to just about any HTTP API with a bit of customization.

IFTT (If This Then That)

focuses on the end user and allow users to share automation recipes for automating your personal life. Examples include posting to Slack when you enter the office in the morning or muting the phone at bedtime.

I'm missing some business oriented features, such as custom integrations with my own apps and APIs multi-step recipes and scheduling. According to their help page custom integrations are being developed.

Amazon AWS Data Pipeline 

is a service I haven't personally tested yet, as I don't use Amazon much. From their landing page it seems to focus on automating workflows between your services and manipulating data.


So what are you waiting for? Start automating your business and/or life.

IIS - Exposing localhost to the world for free

There are many ways to expose your localhost, such as the free option localtunnel.me and the paid option ngrok.com.

Localtunnel gives you a random URL that only lives as long as your connection is held open, which can be a pain when you have to reconfigure external services to call your app every now and then.

Ngrok allows you to reserve a fixed subdomain, but starts at $60/year and $21/month (minimum 3 users for monthly, yuck!).

So, what is a dirt cheap coder to do? We roll our own of course.

Assumptions:

1. You already have IIS Manager installed, if not you know what to do. It's free!
2. You are behind a fixed IP or at least it doesn't change too often.
3. You already own a mydomain.com and can point app.mydomain.com to your IP. I highly recommend cloudflare.com for managing your DNS records. It's free and awesome.
4. Your local app is running on localhost:8000

IIS as Reverse Proxy

There are many tutorials on this, so I'll list the main points.

1. Add a website and point it to some empty folder with the proper permission.
   
   If your website's application pool is named app.mydomain.com then you want to add read/list/execute permissions to the Windows user IIS AppPool\app.mydomain.com.
    
2. Go to URL Rewrite of your website, then add a Reverse Proxy rule. Fill in localhost:8000 and choose to rewrite the HTTP links.
   
    
3. Profit! No? You are probably seeing an IIS error about not being able to forward gzip'ed responses from the local server. Find the web.config of your reverse proxy website folder (no not your app's web.config) and add the bold sections below. This will strip the Accept-Encoding header on incoming, and add it back on outgoing so the local server does not think the caller accepts gzip'ed HTTP. Sweet.
   
   The original stackoverflow post on reverse proxy and gzip.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system.webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="ReverseProxyInboundRule1" stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="(.*)" />
                    <action type="Rewrite" url="http://localhost:8000/{R:1}" />
                    <serverVariables>
                        <set name="HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_ACCEPT_ENCODING" value="{HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING}" />
                        <set name="HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING" value="" />
                    </serverVariables>
                </rule>
            </rules>
            <outboundRules>
                <rule name="ReverseProxyOutboundRule1" preCondition="ResponseIsHtml1">
                    <match filterByTags="A, Form, Img" pattern="^http(s)?://localhost:8000/(.*)" />
                    <action type="Rewrite" value="http{R:1}://app.mydomain.com/{R:2}" />
                </rule>
                <rule name="RestoreAcceptEncoding" preCondition="NeedsRestoringAcceptEncoding">
                  <match serverVariable="HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING" pattern="^(.*)" />
                  <action type="Rewrite" value="{HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_ACCEPT_ENCODING}" />
                </rule>
                <preConditions>
                    <preCondition name="ResponseIsHtml1">
                        <add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/html" />
                    </preCondition>
                    <preCondition name="NeedsRestoringAcceptEncoding">
                      <add input="{HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_ACCEPT_ENCODING}" pattern=".+" />
                    </preCondition>
                </preConditions>
            </outboundRules>
        </rewrite>
    </system.webServer>
</configuration>

Now, either point your domain to your IP or simply edit your local hosts file to point it to 127.0.0.1, and access app.mydomain.com from your browser and watch your local server present its glory stuff.