October 2017 Meetup

For the Monday, October 9th meetup, we will be joined by Ryan Miller for a discussion on building an Alexa Skill using Azure Functions. Please join us on Monday, October 9th for what is sure to be a very entertaining and information meeting.  Bring your questions!

Please RSVP today (helps to ensure we have the right amount of food & drinks).

Abstract: I have an 11-year-old child and a 14-year-old child and I’ve discovered a real pattern with the speech of these two. Unfortunately, sometimes they aren’t around because they’re at school or maybe off at camp. In those times, I have no one around to tell me how much everything sucks. That got me thinking, “Some poor folks don’t even have a teenager in the house. How would they know that everything sucks?” With the proper skill, Alexa can help them out.

In this session, we’ll see what it takes to build an Alexa Skill called Teenage Daughter. The code is C# and the service host is Azure Functions. We’ll cover Custom Slots, Intent Schema, Utterances, and Testing; we’ll delve into Azure functions and how to create multiple environments to keep our production instance separate from development instance; and we’ll cover any other tips and tricks that I’ve learned while creating my Teenage Daughter, which can be found at https://github.com/Intranoggin/AlexaFunctions.

Presenter: Ryan Miller – Principal Consultant, Cardinal Solutions

I am a Solutions Architect with over fifteen (15) years of professional experience. I enjoy building enterprise solutions because those solutions affect change in an organization that can have a long term, positive impact on employees and customers. For the last decade of my career, I have been helping clients design and build enterprise web solutions efficiently on SharePoint and .NET. It can be a challenge to create robust solutions that seamlessly blend out-of-the-box platform capabilities with custom .NET features, and integrate them with other systems. The rapid growth in utilization of Microsoft’s Commercial Cloud (Office365 & Azure) has made these software challenges even more exciting because the available cloud resources are so diverse and extensive. I learned early on in my career that creating the right application can transform the way an enterprise works and have long lasting impacts. As an intern, I created an application for a local manufacturing company to electronically enter and track ISO 9000 & QS9000 documentation. As information became untethered from its filing cabinet, Engineers and Quality Assurance teams who once begrudgingly filled out the required paperwork and filed it, were suddenly collaborating around data that was accessible, discoverable, and pliable. Some years later, I had graduated, gotten married, moved to Boston, bought a bulldog, moved back to Columbus, and had my first child. I had transitioned through 3 different jobs in 2 states and other major life events and then found that this application was still in use and had become a key system for every product being produced out of this manufacturing facility. I was humbled by the application lifecycle and the durability of software in the enterprise. The experience underscored my belief that creating enterprise applications is an opportunity to cause long term business transformations that warrants a real investment in thought.