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A project log for Calendar Events Skill

Creating a skill for the Amazon Echo to allow access to updates and notifications regarding university events.

sthakkarsthakkar 03/10/2017 at 05:570 Comments

The developer kits and forums were a great place to start with my research. One evening after helping a friend with computer science I got really excited about coding and tried to dive straight into the actual coding part of the development of a skill without looking into the support networks. That was definitely the wrong move and just led to some tired frustration. Luckily, a friend pursuing a similar project texted me a link to one of the developer forums - excited because she had found an answer to her question. And from there I realized that there is actually a pretty sizable amount of documentation and already answered questions to lean on when I'm stuck and confused. I browsed around, skimmed a few introductory pages and immediately felt more grounded. It definitely isn't equivalent to Stack Overflow for Java but it is still a whole network of people who have either previously accomplished what I'm attempting or are currently doing the same. And that revelation was important and exciting for me. I set up a Drive folder to store links to pages I found interesting, questions I felt I might run into later on, and just all the random things that caught my eye. I also managed to return to the coding and set up the basic foundation for me to work off of. The next step is acquiring the calendar files, and then reading and analyzing the file - so as to break it up into manageable parts. The first question I want to be able to answer is simply what events are going on, followed by a variable amount of time (today, this weekend, this month).

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