Inspiration
It's slow getting estimates from one app on your phone, only to flip over to the other app, when all you want is to see who can get to your house the fastest.
What it does
It will compare ETA's between Uber and Lyft, and tell you in order which one can get to you first.
In the future, it will be able to tell you who can get you to your destination the cheapest.
It currently only looks at the basic services: UberX and Lyft, but may support other services like SUV's, Luxury etc in the future.
How I built it
NodeJs 8.10 in a lambda. It's automated for the most part, and I should have code pipeline working soon (That is, if I prefer the automation consistency more than the speed of deploying... code pipeline is very slow).
The code has integration tests, unit tests, and my confidence that if the tests work, that the skill will work is around 99%. The only thing that can be tough is how other people launch your skill (accuracy of utterances) and how Alexa pronounces certain things. For this skill, the text is mostly static, until I open it up to other services and Alexa tries to pronounce "UberSUV".
Challenges I ran into
Bugs in index.js (or your handler) are the toughest. It's hardest to unit test, and if you do something dumb like require a package that isn't deployed in your node_modules, it doesn't give you a friendly error message.
The odd bug here and there, but everything is in cloud watch and the logging is - very verbose! This helps.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
I wrote my first skill previous to this. That made the time to build this skill at around 5-6 hours, which includes an hour and a half of debugging some weird address / device location error. I still don't know how I fixed it.
What I learned
Simple skills are just as useful as the ones with more complicated back ends!
What's next for Ride Share
Other Ride Share services, and types of service. Maybe even how long it would take to walk to the nearest Car2Go!?
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