Today, I need to parse a string of a specific format and grab a couple of values from the string using Swift programming language. Sounds like a trivial problem. All I need to do is to use a regular expression to find the information I need.

That post would not have written unless I had encountered a couple of difficulties.

I have to admit that I am relatively new to Swift and some parts of the language are not that obvious to me and probably for some beginners.

Yet another issue I’ve faced today is the Swift documentation. The documentation looks incomplete. Although, I might have a bad luck using documentation related to regular expressions.

Anyway. Let’s jump ahead and see how I’ve solved that issue. I hope that solution can help someone as well.

In the previous article we have created our first Alexa skill. We have implemented all the steps manually. We have created a skill from the web interface. We have configured the interaction model. Then we have created a lambda function with the simplest implementation of the skill. And then we have linked the lambda function and the skill together, so they can work as a one.

All of these steps can be optimized and improved. That’s why this time I would like to cover a way to create an Alexa skill using a command line and a code editor of your choice.

Although we would need to use AWS web interface to create a user and policy, the rest would be done via command line interface.

Let’s get started.

In the previous article we have covered the basics of Alexa skills development. We have discussed what is Alexa and Alexa skills, how does it work in general and why you may be interested to play with the technology.

Today we are going to build our first skill from zero to production an Echo device.

Let’s get started.

During the last few months I was sticking to topics around Elixir.

But as a developer there are some other areas in software development I am interested in. So I would like to write about them too and share my experience.

Recently I was playing around with Amazon Alexa skills development. I’ve found that fun and interesting. So let’s get started.

When you are developer and work on different projects, sooner or later you would face a need to extract some part of functionality into separate libraries to reuse it.

Different languages and frameworks provide their own functionality to distribute libraries among other developers or within a single company.

You probably already know some of them. “npm” is a package manager for JavaScript. For Ruby, it would be “Ruby Gems”. Elixir is not an exception here. For Elixir and Erlang, we have “Hex” as a package manager.

So, let’s see how we can publish our own Elixir package.