Test Amazon Alexa Skills Offline With Mocha And Chai For Node.js

By now you’re probably aware that I’m all about Amazon Alexa skills since I’m a proud owner of an Amazon Echo. I had released a Alexa skill called BART Control and published a guide on creating a simple skill with Node.js and Lambda. If you went through my Node.js and Lambda guide you probably found it pretty painful to test the skill you were working on. The constant building and uploading to Lambda could easily get out of control. What if I told you there was a much simpler way that could save you a ton of time?

We’re going to take a look at adding test cases for testing an Alexa skill offline without ever having to upload the skill to Lambda.

Create An Amazon Alexa Skill Using Node.js And AWS Lambda

Recently I published my first skill for Amazon’s Alexa voice service called, BART Control. This skill used a variety of technologies and public APIs to become useful. In specific, I developed the skill with Node.js and the AWS Lambda service. However, what I mentioned is only a high level of what was done to make the Amazon Alexa skill possible. What must be done to get a functional skill that works on Amazon Alexa powered devices?

We’re going to see how to create a simple Amazon Alexa skill using Node.js and Lambda that works on various Alexa powered devices such as the Amazon Echo.

BART Control Skill For Amazon’s Alexa Released

I am pleased to announce that my first ever skill for Amazon Alexa powered devices has gone live in the Amazon Skill Marketplace. My skill, BART Control, accesses live information about the Bay Area Rapid Transit system in northern California.

If you’re unfamiliar with Amazon Alexa, it can be described as follows per Amazon:

Alexa, the voice service that powers Echo, provides capabilities, or skills, that enable customers to interact with devices in a more intuitive way using voice. Examples of these skills include the ability to play music, answer general questions, set an alarm or timer and more. Alexa is built in the cloud, so it is always getting smarter. The more customers use Alexa, the more she adapts to speech patterns, vocabulary, and personal preferences.

I personally own an Amazon Echo, but there is a wide variety of hardware that is compatible with Amazon’s voice service.

Now let me share some specifics about the skill that I developed and what I used to develop it.

TPDP Episode #3: Developer Tools that can Make You More Productive Towards Your Next Release

In this episode of The Polyglot Developer Podcast I sit down with two of my good friends, Raymond Camden and Simon Reimler, and discuss developer tools and strategies for being successful. Episode #3: Developer Tools that can Make You More Productive Towards Your Next Release covers a lot of ground and is broken up into three main sections:

1. What tools are used for planning, prior to development and design
2. What tools are used for developing and designing an application all the way to release
3. What tools are used for maintaining and driving the success of a released application

This podcast episode is not specific to any programming language or release platform. In other words, whether your a web developer, mobile app developer, or game designer, you will be able to find this information valuable.

Webinar Series: Building A CEA2N And NativeScript Application

Today I have finished the final episode of a five-part webinar series on the subject of Couchbase, Express Framework, Angular, and Node.js (CEA2N) application development. This webinar series has been going on for the past five weeks where each week I covered a new topic relative to the stack leading up to a NativeScript mobile application.

Each episode of this webinar was recorded and can be viewed for free here. This is some premium content!

An episode breakdown and project source code can be seen below.

Convert An Uploaded Image To A Base64 String In Node.js

Not too long ago I wrote about uploading files to a Node.js server that was making use of the Multer middleware. In that scenario the files were saved to the file system and even though I didn’t demonstrate it, in theory the file metadata would be stored in a database. What if you wanted to store the files in a database as a base64 string instead of on the file system?

We’re going to take a look at what it would take to allow file uploads in Node.js and convert them into base64 strings for database storage.

Upload Files To Node.js Using Angular

When I build web applications, my least favorite part is always in the realm of file uploads. They are often complicated to do and take a lot of time. Pretty much every web application lately, regardless of what it is, requires file uploads, even if it is just to upload a profile picture.

Since I’m all about Angular lately, I figured it would be great to show how to upload images (or any file) to a back-end. In this particular example I’m using Node.js.