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.