Definitely going to give this a try over the weekend. I bailed pretty quick a few months ago when I wanted to build a spelling bee skill for Alexa in Python. It was a total joke--terrible docs, cumbersome API and just simply not fun. Hoping this is a step in the right direction.
Have to agree. Even the code examples for some of the skill types aren't examples of using the API, they're examples of things like migrating existing code to a newer version of the API, which means much of the code is not only hard to read but irrelevant.
And the Smart Home skill APIs are very different from the normal skills, so most of the tutorials that are available don't help much.
Lambda is required as a back-end for Smart Home skills, but must still be set up manually which means copying and pasting things back and forth between completely unrelated management interfaces, some on AWS, some on Amazon Developer Services.
User authentication is required for Smart Home skills, but after checking the configuration very carefully and still seeing the auth step fail in the Alexa app even though the OAUTH calls succeeded, with little to no visibility into why it failed, I stopped wasting time on it.
