Rapid development using AWS
After publishing my first Amazon Skill called "Fancy Quiz", I decided to test the rapid development claims made by Cloud service providers. In theory I had everything needed to rapidly develop my next idea. I learned about AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, Amazon API Gateway, IAM, and a few more tools building "Fancy Quiz", and I didn't need to worry about any infrastructure.
So, I put all of it to the test. My new Alexa skill called the "English Professor" took only 8 days from conception to going live! I have to admit, it took one day more than planned, and I explain why below.
Monday - I looked around at what skills are available, what are the most common user complaints, and more importantly, what is it that I am interested in. After all, it should be a skill that I want to use myself. So, I decided to develop a skill where I can get random idioms or proverbs. But, I had to go beyond what is already out there, so I also designed a search capability where the user can ask for a specific idiom, or ask the English Professor to give an idiom with a particular word (or words) in it. For example asking the English Professor to give an idiom with the word monkey, or words cart and horse. For this I had to design a mini Probabilistic Matching Engine (PME) where if a user looked for the word eat, Alexa would also give some scores to beat, heat, and other similar combinations.
Tuesday - The design is completed, and the initial dialogues are working fine. One of the great things with AWS rapid development is that you can test the content (the idioms, and proverbs) as you test the application itself. This allows developers to combine development and testing together and speed things up.
Wednesday-Thursday - Most of the work was focused on the content. No more code development. I can probably say about 60 to 70 percent of the overall time was spent here, building the content.
Friday - The D-day. Knowing that Alexa Skills certification takes 2 to 5 days, I wanted to submit the application by the end of the day, hoping that by the next Monday, it passes the certification and will be live. I managed to get it submitted, but in this rush, while I tried to be as systematic as I can testing and retesting the application, I missed one particular test case.
Monday - Early morning, I get the notification that I missed a use case and my skill was rejected! So, I worked frantically all Monday, fixed the issue and resubmitted.
Tuesday - I was very happy and impressed by Amazon's quick reply. My new skill, the "English Professor" went live early morning.
So, there you go, in eight days, I was able to design, develop, and deploy world wide an application using AWS cloud services. If there is one thing to be learned here, is that when pushing for speed, no matter how experienced you think you are, you still need to develop and expect some minor delays and issues. If your business can accept this, then go for it, or you will end up behind the eight ball! (Ask the English Professor what is the meaning of behind the eight ball)
The skill is available in Canada, US, England, Australia, and India.
