Okay, so it isn’t going to win any awards. It also doesn’t make any money, no revenue stream at all. I don’t even track what the most popular names requested are. Nope, none of it.
It’s a pointless little skill with absolutely no redeeming quality other than spreading awesomeness and joy.
It is the skill that got all of this started. A while back I was doing WordPress development (and not very happy about it) and began working on my Amazon certifications. I didn’t even want a “talking computer”. Point of fact, I actually despised them. Frankly, I found the blathering on and on of the GPS too much to bear, and would subsequently put it on mute.
A friend won an Echo and posted on Facebook about it. I snarkily commented “Hey Alexa, tell Brenda she’s awesome!” Then, I got an Echo a few months later as a gift. I was on vacation at the time, so I tried setting it up on the hotel WiFi. That was pretty much a non-starter, so I packed it back up wand waited until I got home.
When I got home and set it up, I was in the middle of my AWS Developer certification training and started seeing stuff on developing for Alexa. I downloaded one of the skill blueprints and set it and got it working. I decided to build one from scratch and see if I could make it work. The question was, what to build? Then I remembered my friends Facebook post.
Tell Someone They’re Awesome! Dedicated to my fabulous girlfriend, Virginia Farley and inspired by a Facebook post by Brenda Ring, I have written and published my first Alexa Skill for Amazon Echo devices. Yes, this is an actual, published Alexa Skill you can enable on your own Amazon device! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074G2YYQZ/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-skills&ie=UTF8&qid=1501855387&sr=1-1&keywords=tell+someone+they%27re+awesome In the midst of trying to decide what to get me for my recent 55th birthday, Virginia brilliantly decided to get me an Amazon Echo to aid me in my studies. As many of you already know, I have been diligently working at getting Amazon AWS Certified and have already passed my Solution Architect – Associate certification. I’m currently working on my Developer – Associate Certification and am currently learning to work with the API Gateway and Lambda sections of the available Amazon services. I wrote this skill not just as a training exercise, but decided to publish it as well to experience what getting through the certification process was like. All in all, it’s been an “awesome” experience!
Posted by Tom Bruner on Friday, August 4, 2017
I started furiously writing code and had the skill pulled together by the end of the next day and made the following video, shared it on Facebook, and everyone had a good laugh about it. There wasn’t much to it, and I hadn’t planned on doing anything else with it. Then, I began to get messages and pop ups from Amazon, “Publish your skills and win an Echo Dot and a pair of Binary Socks.” I thought to myself, “well, I should have an idea of how the publishing process works”. So I filled in the required fields and clicked submit. Three days later, I had a published skill in the skill store.
If you would like to Tell Someone They’re Awesome, you can find the skill here!
It’s funny how life winds up through a series of events, leading you to a place you never considered being. It never occurred to me to be an Alexa developer, until I already was one.