Using Amazon’s Alexa to Get CircleCI Build Statuses
Being a DevOps tool sometimes places CircleCI at the intersection of very interesting and varied projects. I would like to start showcasing some of the more interesting or technically advanced projects to the rest of our community. Maybe these projects can even help inspire something awesome you’ll make yourself one weekend.
The project I’m featuring today is called “Alexa CircleCI Skill”.
I came across Alexa CircleCI Skill a few days ago over on the hackathon-centric website Devpost.
The Project
The Alexa CircleCI 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 CircleCI. This means with an Amazon Echo on your desk, you can literally ask Alexa what’s going on with your builds and she will tell you. In true hackathon spirit, the source-code is open-source =).
Here’s a video of this bad boy in action:
Transcript:
User: “Alexa, ask CircleCI ‘How are tests?’”
Alexa: “Uh oh. You’ve got some failing builds. KicksterSupervisorBG has status ‘no tests’. KicksterSupervisor2.0 has status ‘failed’.”
The Software/Hardware Stack
- CircleCI (that’s us!)
- an Amazon Echo Dot
- Node.js
- AWS Lambda
This neat project was built by Feynman Liang during the Amazon Alexa Skills Challenge Hackathon. His purpose was simple:
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.
The original Devpost link and the GitHub project can be found below.
Originally published at circleci.com on March 29, 2017.
