Goodbye Team

Yesterday was my last day at Twitter. It’s always bittersweet to leave a company you believe in and a team you love. That said, I’m excited to be joining the team at Amazon in Austin. It will be nice to actually be colocated with my team mates as we work on hard problems together

Alexa skills with Elixir

As I delve into working with Elixir and Phoenix, I decided to write an Alexa Skill. The first thing I needed was a nice api to do so, so I wrote that.

Modeling the Alexa Request and Response

The first thing I did is write Elixir structs for the Alexa response and request objects. I like knowing the shape of my data ahead of time and the dot syntax is more concise than a map access. This step is fairly easy.

iOS Push Notifications in Elixir

I’m currently playing with Elixir, but I don’t have any strong product ideas, so I’m building generic infrastructure I might need later on. I have solved some of these problems with other languages, I find rebuilding these things as a good way to familiarize myself with new languages and frameworks. The first thing I decided to build out is a push notification service.

I’ll mostly focus on using the legacy binary protocol in this implementation. The repository is available here.

Beginner's Eyes

As mentioned in my about page, I’ve mostly been focused on iOS development for the past few years. I have worked on other platforms, mainly Android and some backend Ruby code, but it is not frequent and it has been a while. I also have not deployed to a server since using capistrano or fabric a long time ago. Since I’m on parental leave from work, so I decided to correct that.

Setting up

I figured a good way of kicking off this site would be writing how it’s set up. I have it deployed on linode using Hugo and the NGINX docker container. The idea being that when I’m experimenting, I can easily deploy containers with whatever services I’m building and use NGINX as a frontend.

Remote login and user setup.

After creating my linode, the first thing I did was setup a sudo user and disabled root login in ssh.