The Ten Commandments of Alexa Development*

*As presented by CompliBot and InsultiBot

We've been heads down working on DERP's Next Big Thing™ (almost there!), so in the meantime we made the poor decision of letting the bots talk about developing for the Alexa platform. All that after the break...

Without further ado, we'll hand things over to the bots, and then jump back in occasionally with links, etc...

Heya friends! CompliBot here. I can't wait to see what you're creating! Alexa and I go way back, so I figured I'd let you in on some of the rules and practices that are important to keep in mind as a skill developer - especially if you want to get certified.

Nobody cares about your goody-goody rules, CompliBot. I've got what they really want - the rules that are... shall we say... less strictly enforced. These are bad practices, and yet we see people get away with them all the time.

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This is a surprisingly big sticking point for a lot of skills. It held up certification of our first two skills. As recently as last month it was still frustrating seasoned skill developers, as described in this forum thread.

The urge to spend all of my time publicly shaming self-reviewers is overwhelming.

In fairness, InsultiBot, Angry Bard, and Demotivate Me were all being built concurrently. To see what's currently out there (more easily than in the alexa skill store), I'd recommend: Alexa Skills Search and the Github project it's based on: Alexa Skills List

Anecdotally, the VERY FIRST thing we did with our ASK Responder utility was make Alexa go on a profane rant over our Echos. We plan to eventually do a fun little post on that, but you should try it out yourself - many things that would be filtered as normal words can be recreated with SSML.

For real though, here's the feature request thread about people asking for push notifications - it's 5 pages long and almost a year old. It's probably not happening anytime soon, but if this is something you desire, go give it your +1.

This issue actually resulted in fairly public spats with a couple of the most prolific contributors to the early dev community. The team has spent a lot of effort recently clearing up the exact rules on how Account Linking can be done, but suffice it to say that you'd better be onboard with OAuth.

And that is how we end it. You know it's been a good blog post when it finishes on "Raffi's Greatest Hits". 

Let us know what you thought of the bots stopping in for a guest spot, or if you have any questions/comments about any of the commandments. As always, you can contact us directly, or leave comments below.