My employer is having a Hackathon and the team I am on is investigating Alexa skills.
The plan was to use the email address of the Alexa account to match against the email address of the customer we already have. It took us all a little while to get a hello world Alexa app stood up. Alexa has been around long enough that there are now more wrong setup articles than good ones.
The Amazon documentation is lacking in actual code samples alongside the documentation.
It does have a full setup including it’s own github build pipeline and deployment tools. The downside is that this makes it more difficult to integrate with your own build tools. For example it wants you to push.to master on it’s repo, yet ours has that name restricted, so we need to branch again to push it to github.
The debugging experience is painful. The default logging system is very weak. A simple list of log events that is hard to search.
The simulator is missing key features. You can’t trigger permission requests and there is no way to bypass these. You need permissions to fetch a basic email address, and getting this involves an interesting dance with various other services.
Let’s see if this gets better on Day 2.
Developer Rants 