Alexa Circle CI Skill

Circle CI Dashboard
Echo Dot

Inspiration

Great engineering culture starts with accountability. To ensure engineers are accountable for the code they push and address problems proactively, every employee should have a quick and easy way to find out the status of software builds. We were faced with this challenge at our day jobs and were inspired to find a quick, convenient, and natural way for anyone at our company to quickly gleam insight into the health of our software builds.

What it does

The Alexa Circle CI skill provides a status update summarizing the statuses of the last build of the master branch of every project within an organization's list of projects registered with Circle CI.

How we built it

We built the back-end with Node and CircleCI's REST API and used AWS Lambda for hosting. The front-end is provided through the Alexa SDK.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Pagination (currently 3 at a time) over the list of failing builds so the user isn't overwhelmed
Caching of the build statuses in session storage so only one HTTP request is sent to Circle CI

What's next for Alexa Circle CI Skill

Add configurability so anyone can provide their Circle API token and use this skill for their organization's builds.