Amazon Alexa Skills Challenge and My Pocket

Update 21 Aug 2017 The skill is now open-source! Visit it on GitHub: github.com/carsonip/alexa-pocket Intro I don’t have much time for this blog post because I’ll be taking an early flight tomorrow. Maybe I’ll add something later. Hackathon To state the obvious, the hackathon is about building Alexa skills. I have submitted 2 entries: My Pocket and Tomato Helper. I’ll focus on My Pocket in this blog post. My Pocket The Alexa skill is about reading your saved pocket articles to you using Alexa.

Slash Hack 2016

Hackathon It is the second and the last hackathon in my SF trip. The /hack hackathon organized by HackerEarth gives me an enjoyable weekend. Participants are supposed to team up before the day. I didn’t manage to find a team beforehand and end up meeting 2 wonderful teammates at the venue. One Singaporean, one Japanese. They want to work on Amazon Echo and luckily I bring one. Match made in heaven.

GitHub Open Source Hack 2016

Hackathon The weekend is enjoyable. Martin (My roommate in SF) and I join the Open Source Hack organized by GitHub at GitHub HQ in SF. Pretty fun. The venue is great. The pool table is my favorite. Great food all the time. However, the atmosphere is more like “just for fun” or educational than competitive, which is kind of different from what I expected. Idea The guy next to us has an Amazon Echo.