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Every new starter at Twilio has to build an application using one of our products, then demo it to receive their fabled Track Jacket. For my application, because WiFi is always a pain at conferences, I wrote a PHP script that sends you the next talks for a given event.
Writing this so it worked locally was relatively straightforward with PHP’s inbuilt web server and ngrok, but when I got up to demo this in front of my peers, I didn’t want to be relying on my laptop to be open, awake and responding to the proxied HTTP requests. This code needs to be sitting somewhere on the internet so that it can respond to messages any time of the day or night, and not just when my laptop was open and connected to the wifi.
Serverless functions are great for this; they allow you to run code ...
As I'm sitting here in Twilio's San Francisco office thinking about what to write for my introductory blog post, it's hard not to be introspective. It's a long way from Swansea, a small city in South Wales in the UK, to San Francisco. Both physically and figuratively. Physically it's a 3 hours drive, an 11-hour flight, 20-minute taxi, and an 8 hour time difference. But in reality, it's taken the help of several amazing people and an entire dev community to get me here.
I'm pretty old in terms of an internet developer. I started my dev career back when people were worried about planes falling out of the sky when the year 1999 rolled over to 2000. I started work coding in ASP connecting to a massive Oracle database; showing metrics over the intranet was cheaper than buying licenses for bespoke process control software at the local steelworks. Yes ...