Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/1bluCgly0LE/elegant-branding-work-red-circle-oddone

Elegant Branding Work for Red Circle by Oddone

abduzeedoNov 13, 2019

My old friend Roger Oddone has been quiet for a long time and now I understand why, he’s been working on some killer branding projects and the latest one is for RedCircle, a platform designed to empower the podcaster community to grow, earn money and be heard through free podcast hosting and a cross-promotional marketplace.

Oddone and brand strategist, Caren Williams, worked together with the San Francisco-based startup to define its strategic brand platform and visual identity system. Drawing inspiration from a microphone, sound waves and a red recording icon, the visual identity was designed to be flexible and to convey a sense of sophistication, contemporaneity, and boldness.​​​​​​​

Branding

Credits

Visual identity system: Roger Oddone
Brand strategy: Caren Williams​​​​​​​

For more information make sure to check out Roger’s website and follow Oddone on Instagram

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/react-native-navigation-library/?utm_source=rss

One of the most important aspects of React Native app development is the navigation. It’s what allows users to get to the pages they’re looking for. That’s why it’s important to choose the best navigation library to suit your needs.

If your app has a lot of screens with relatively complex UI, it might be worth exploring React Native Navigation instead of React Navigation. This is because there will always be performance bottlenecks with React Navigation, since it works off the same JavaScript thread as the rest of the app. The more complex your UI, the more data has to be passed to that bridge, which can potentially slow it down.

In this tutorial, we’ll be looking at the React Native Navigation library by Wix, an alternative navigation library for those who are looking for a smoother navigation performance for their React Native apps.

Prerequisites

Knowledge of React and React Native is required to follow this tutorial. Prior experience with a navigation library such as React Navigation is optional.

App Overview

In order to demonstrate how to use the library, we’ll be creating a simple app that uses it. The app will have five screens in total:

Initialization: this serves as the initial screen for the app. If the user is logged in, it will automatically navigate to the home screen. If not, the user is navigated to the login screen.
Login: this allows the user to log in so they can view the home, gallery, and feed. To simplify things, the login will just be mocked; no actual authentication code will be involved. From this screen, the user can also go to the forgot-password screen.
ForgotPassword: a filler screen, which asks for the user’s email address. This will simply be used to demonstrate stack navigation.
Home: the initial screen that the user will see when they log in. From here, they can also navigate to either the gallery or feed screens via a bottom tab navigation.
Gallery: a filler screen which shows a photo gallery UI.
Feed: a filler screen which shows a news feed UI.

Here’s what the app will look like:

You can find the source code of the sample app on this GitHub repo.

Bootstrapping the App

Let’s start by generating a new React Native project:

react-native init RNNavigation –version react-native@0.57.8

Note: we’re using a slightly older version of React Native, because React Native Navigation doesn’t work well with later versions of React Native. React Native Navigation hasn’t really kept up with the changes in the core of React Native since version 0.58. The only version known to work flawlessly with React Native is the version we’re going to use. If you check the issues on their repo, you’ll see various issues on version 0.58 and 0.59. There might be workarounds on those two versions, but the safest bet is still version 0.57.

As for React Native version 0.60, the core team has made a lot of changes. One of them is the migration to AndroidX, which aims to make it clearer which packages are bundled with the Android operating system. This essentially means that if a native module uses any of the old packages that got migrated to the new androidx.* package hierarchy, it will break. There are tools such as jetifier, which allows for migration to AndroidX. But this doesn’t ensure React Native Navigation will work.

Next, install the dependencies of the app:

react-native-navigation — the navigation library that we’re going to use.
@react-native-community/async-storage — for saving data to the app’s local storage.
react-native-vector-icons — for showing icons for the bottom tab navigation.

yarn add react-native-navigation @react-native-community/async-storage react-native-vector-icons

In the next few sections, we’ll be setting up the packages we just installed.

Setting up React Native Navigation

First, we’ll set up the React Native Navigation library. The instructions that we’ll be covering here are also in the official documentation. Unfortunately, it’s not written in a very friendly way for beginners, so we’ll be covering it in more detail.

Note: the demo project includes an Android and iOS folders as well. You can use those as a reference if you encounter any issues with setting things up.

Since the name of the library is very long, I’ll simply refer to it as RNN from now on.

Android Setup

In this section, we’ll take a look at how you can set up RNN for Android. Before you proceed, it’s important to update all the SDK packages to the latest versions. You can do that via the Android SDK Manager.

settings.gradle

Add the following to your android/settings.gradle file:

include ':react-native-navigation'
project(':react-native-navigation').projectDir = new File(rootProject.projectDir, '../node_modules/react-native-navigation/lib/android/app/')

Gradle Wrapper Properties

In your android/gradle/wrapper/gradle-wrapper.properties, update Gradle’s distributionUrl to use version 4.4 if it’s not already using it:

distributionUrl=https://services.gradle.org/distributions/gradle-4.4-all.zip

build.gradle

Next, in your android/build.gradle file, add mavenLocal() and mavenCentral() under buildscript -> repositories:

buildscript {
repositories {
google()
jcenter()

// add these:
mavenLocal()
mavenCentral()
}
}

Next, update the classpath under the buildscript -> dependencies to point out to the Gradle version that we need:

buildscript {
repositories {
…
}

dependencies {
classpath 'com.android.tools.build:gradle:3.0.1'
}

}

Under allprojects -> repositories, add mavenCentral() and JitPack. This allows us to pull the data from React Native Navigation’s JitPack repository:

allprojects {
allprojects {

repositories {
mavenLocal()
google()
jcenter()
mavenCentral() // add this
maven { url 'https://jitpack.io' } // add this
}

}

Next, add the global config for setting the build tools and SDK versions for Android:

allprojects {
…
}

ext {
buildToolsVersion = "27.0.3"
minSdkVersion = 19
compileSdkVersion = 26
targetSdkVersion = 26
supportLibVersion = "26.1.0"
}

Lastly, we’d still want to keep the default react-native run-android command when compiling the app, so we have to set Gradle to ignore other flavors of React Native Navigation except the one we’re currently using (reactNative57_5). Ignoring them ensures that we only compile the specific version we’re depending on:

ext {
…
}

subprojects { subproject ->
afterEvaluate {
if ((subproject.plugins.hasPlugin('android') || subproject.plugins.hasPlugin('android-library'))) {
android {
variantFilter { variant ->
def names = variant.flavors*.name
if (names.contains("reactNative51") || names.contains("reactNative55") || names.contains("reactNative56") || names.contains("reactNative57")) {
setIgnore(true)
}
}
}
}
}
}

Note: there are four other flavors of RNN that currently exist. These are the ones we’re ignoring above:

reactNative51
reactNative55
reactNative56
reactNative57

android/app/build.gradle

On your android/app/build.gradle file, under android -> compileOptions, make sure that the source and target compatibility version is 1.8:

android {
defaultConfig {
…
}

compileOptions {
sourceCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
targetCompatibility JavaVersion.VERSION_1_8
}
}

Then, in your dependencies, include react-native-navigation as a dependency:

dependencies {
implementation fileTree(dir: "libs", include: ["*.jar"])
implementation "com.android.support:appcompat-v7:${rootProject.ext.supportLibVersion}"
implementation "com.facebook.react:react-native:+"
implementation project(':react-native-navigation') // add this
}

Lastly, under android -> defaultConfig, set the missingDimensionStrategy to reactNative57_5. This is the version of RNN that’s compatible with React Native 0.57.8:

defaultConfig {
applicationId "com.rnnavigation"
minSdkVersion rootProject.ext.minSdkVersion
targetSdkVersion rootProject.ext.targetSdkVersion
missingDimensionStrategy "RNN.reactNativeVersion", "reactNative57_5" // add this
versionCode 1
versionName "1.0"
ndk {
abiFilters "armeabi-v7a", "x86"
}
}

The post Getting Started with the React Native Navigation Library appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/11/adapting-agile-part-time-teams/

Adapting Agile For Part-Time Teams

Adapting Agile For Part-Time Teams

Philip Kiely

2019-11-12T12:00:00+00:00
2019-11-12T13:09:41+00:00

<p>The formal notion of the Agile software development method is about as old as I am (the Agile Manifesto was published in February 2001). I point this out not to <a href="https://xkcd.com/1686/">make you feel old</a>, but instead to demonstrate that Agile has had a long time to infiltrate software development. While the methodology advocates for &ldquo;co-located, dedicated teams,&rdquo; in its ubiquity Agile is frequently applied to teams partially or fully composed of part-time workers. While there are lessons to be taken from the practice, Agile must be adapted to support, rather than hinder, part-time teams.</p>

<p>In this article, we’ll consider applying Agile to a team of 5-10 people each working 20 hours per week on a project. We’ll further consider the frequent intersection of remote work with part-time teams and discuss situations where contributors work as few as 5 hours per week on a project. We’ll also hear from professors Armando Fox at the University of California, Berkeley and Barbara Johnson at Grinnell College with their thoughts on part-time Agile teams.</p>

<h3 id="why-does-part-time-work-happen">Why Does Part-Time Work Happen?</h3>

<p>While the &ldquo;5 developers for 20 hours&rdquo; example may seem contrived, many situations lead to the scenario. You may have:</p>

<ul>
<li>Developers assigned to multiple clients, projects, or teams within a single company,</li>
<li>A team with contractors or co-op interns,</li>
<li>Volunteers working on an open-source or community project, or</li>
<li>An after-hours team working on a startup or product.</li>
</ul>

<p>While we will examine the many challenges involved in managing teams under these constraints, usually the alternative to working part-time with someone isn’t their full-time efforts, the alternative is not being able to work with them at all. While part-time workers and teams often require extensive compromises, with clear and effective management they can still be a huge net positive to a team and business.</p>

<div data-component="FeaturePanel" data-audience="non-subscriber" data-remove="true" class="feature-panel-container hidden"></div>

<h3 id="tenets-of-agile">Tenets Of Agile</h3>

<p>Given its prevalence in the software development industry, everyone understands Agile slightly differently. To get through adapting the framework together, we need a shared vocabulary to define &ldquo;regular&rdquo; Agile, you know, the kind that advocates for &ldquo;dedicated, co-located teams.&rdquo; Agile implements practices, rituals, and roles to promote effective work.</p>

<p>Agile, as implemented, involves certain practices:</p>

<ul>
<li>&ldquo;Sprints&rdquo; are discrete units of time, often 2 weeks, that determine the cycle of work for Agile teams.</li>
<li>&ldquo;Stories&rdquo; or &ldquo;user stories&rdquo; are well-scoped units of work that a single team member can complete in some fraction of the sprint.</li>
<li>Often, teams organize their stories on &ldquo;kanban boards&rdquo; or similar methods of tracking story state: to do, in progress, in review, and done in a given sprint.</li>
</ul>

<p>Agile revolves around four rituals:</p>

<ol>
<li><strong>Sprint Planning</strong><br />
This is a meeting that opens each sprint with writing, estimating, prioritizing, and assigning stories that the team intends to complete for the sprint.</li>
<li><strong>Daily Stand-Up</strong><br />
A chance for teams to meet every day to discuss the previous day’s progress, discuss the day’s work, and raise any roadblocks. Ideally, the meeting is very short (5-15 minutes) and is near the start of the workday to minimize the interruption of dedicated work time.</li>
<li><strong>Sprint Review</strong><br />
This is part of a meeting which ends each sprint with a review of work accomplished, new backlog items, missed estimates, and other quantifiers of team progress.</li>
<li><strong>Sprint Retrospective</strong><br />
A discrete meeting or block of time for discussing what went well and what to improve about how the team operates in qualitative terms.</li>
</ol>

<p>Agile teams usually have distinct, cross-functional roles. Common roles include:</p>

<ul>
<li>The &ldquo;project manager/team lead&rdquo; manages the team, assigns work, reports to management, assists team members, and performs other managerial duties.</li>
<li>The &ldquo;scrum master&rdquo; is responsible for leading Agile rituals.</li>
<li>A &ldquo;product owner/product manager&rdquo; represents the client or end-user to the team. They have an active hand in writing stories, reviewing product functionality, and communicating progress to clients and expectations to the team.</li>
<li>An &ldquo;individual contributor&rdquo; is any member of the team whose main responsibility is building the product. Developers, designers, QA specialists and writers are all examples of individual contributors.</li>
</ul>

<p>While these definitions are important for our shared understanding, the major theme of this article is that achieving your team’s goals is more important than implementing &ldquo;proper&rdquo; Agile. If this doesn’t exactly match your setup, common elements should help apply upcoming recommendations to your experience.</p>

<figure class="

">

<a href="https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/e0200d18-740a-45d3-ab60-096581b5d70b/board-irfan-simsar-unsplash.jpg">

<img
srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/e0200d18-740a-45d3-ab60-096581b5d70b/board-irfan-simsar-unsplash.jpg 400w,
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src="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/e0200d18-740a-45d3-ab60-096581b5d70b/board-irfan-simsar-unsplash.jpg"
sizes="70vw"
alt="'Scrum Board' by İrfan Simsar on Unsplash"
/>

</a>

<figcaption class="op-vertical-bottom">
(Image credit: ‘İrfan Simsar’ on <a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a>) (<a href='https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/e0200d18-740a-45d3-ab60-096581b5d70b/board-irfan-simsar-unsplash.jpg'>Large preview</a>)
</figcaption>

</figure>

<h3 id="constraints-of-part-time-work">Constraints Of Part-Time Work</h3>

<p>Immediately, we see how the constraints of part-time work cut into standard Agile. First off, in a given two-week sprint, each employee may spend 2 hours in sprint planning, 10 times 15 minutes in stand-up, 1 hour in sprint review, and 30 minutes in sprint retrospective, for a total of 6 hours in Agile meetings. For a full-time employee, that’s only 7.5% of their 80-hour fortnight, for a half-time employee it doubles to 15%. Add in other meetings and account for context switching and suddenly your individual contributors have very little time left each week to individually contribute.</p>

<p>Thus, part-time work exacerbates the need for good capacity estimation and up-front planning while reducing the time available for it. Fortunately, Agile’s notion of story points applies well. Story points estimate effort rather than time and thus stay constantly effective between full-time and part-time workers, though of course part-time workers will take longer to achieve the same amount of story points, which you can account for by measuring the team’s velocity.</p>

<p>Even if your development team is part-time, your clients may not be. Customer support, emergency bug fixes, outage repairs, and even regular communication can be more difficult with part-time work adding additional overhead.</p>

<figure class="

">

<a href="https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/107f0a17-6c3c-4678-ae1c-d67d231d80c4/watch-brad-neathery-unsplash.jpg">

<img
srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/107f0a17-6c3c-4678-ae1c-d67d231d80c4/watch-brad-neathery-unsplash.jpg 400w,
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src="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/107f0a17-6c3c-4678-ae1c-d67d231d80c4/watch-brad-neathery-unsplash.jpg"
sizes="100vw"
alt="'Man in a watch typing' by Brad Neathery on Unsplash"
/>

</a>

<figcaption class="op-vertical-bottom">
(Image credit: ‘Brad Neathery’ on <a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a>) (<a href='https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/107f0a17-6c3c-4678-ae1c-d67d231d80c4/watch-brad-neathery-unsplash.jpg'>Large preview</a>)
</figcaption>

</figure>

<div class="sponsors__lead-place"></div>

<h3 id="frequently-intersecting-constraints">Frequently Intersecting Constraints</h3>

<p>While not all part-time teams will experience these additional challenges, in my experience part-time work often overlaps with remote work, different time zones and availabilities, and classification of workers as temporary, contractors, or interns instead of employees. This is not an article about any of these things, but they bear mentioning.</p>

<p>Part-time work adds significant overhead to the already difficult task of finding a regular time when everyone is available to meet. If some team members work in the mornings and others in the evenings or are located across the world from each other, scheduling quickly becomes impossible. GitLab has published <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/communication/">extensive documentation on remote communication</a> that might be helpful.</p>

<p>Working with contractors, student interns, temporary hires, or other non-permanent teams or team members brings its own advantages and challenges. That said, however, someone got to the table, the Agile framework treats them as an equal member of the team and stakeholder in the project.</p>

<figure class="

">

<a href="https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/7abbdc79-3c84-487b-a3b9-c9b9d099b3d6/meeting-you-x-ventures-unsplash.jpg">

<img
srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/7abbdc79-3c84-487b-a3b9-c9b9d099b3d6/meeting-you-x-ventures-unsplash.jpg 400w,
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src="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/7abbdc79-3c84-487b-a3b9-c9b9d099b3d6/meeting-you-x-ventures-unsplash.jpg"
sizes="100vw"
alt="'Untitled' (Meeting) by You X Ventures on Unsplash."
/>

</a>

<figcaption class="op-vertical-bottom">
(Image credit: ‘You X Ventures’ on <a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a>) (<a href='https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/7abbdc79-3c84-487b-a3b9-c9b9d099b3d6/meeting-you-x-ventures-unsplash.jpg'>Large preview</a>)
</figcaption>

</figure>

<h3 id="redefining-rituals-for-part-time-teams">Redefining Rituals For Part-Time Teams</h3>

<p>Now that we’ve framed the challenges that part-time work creates, let’s focus on solutions. While I’ve seen a number of successful modifications to Agile rituals for part-time teams, I reached out to Professor Armando Fox, co-author of <em>Engineering Software as a Service: An Agile Approach Using Cloud Computing</em> with David Patterson. In an email interview, he emphasized two key goals of agile rituals to retain:</p>

<blockquote>“The reason Agile is a good fit [for part-time teams] is the idea of using user stories as the unit of work. The key to doing this successfully is up-front planning and continuous check-ins.”<br /><br />&mdash; Armando Fox</blockquote>

<p>Sprint planning condenses up-front planning to a single high-value meeting. For part-time teams, the product owner, scrum master, and team lead (who may be only one or two people, more on that later) should do as much pre-meeting work as possible to define well-scoped tickets for the individual contributors to estimate and take. Fox said &ldquo;if stories are tightly-circumscribed, branches are short-lived, stories require modest amounts of code that can be delivered with good test coverage, and code quality is maintained through continuous code review (pull requests) as well as the use of code quality measurement tools, the team can successfully divide-and-conquer even if they’re not always working at the same time.&rdquo; That’s definitely a lot of &ldquo;if&rdquo; statements, working in this manner will take dedicated effort from the entire team, but should result in a quality product.</p>

<p>The other half of the equation is continuous check-ins. Agile’s daily stand-ups work great for co-located full-time teams, if everyone’s in the office by 9 or 10 AM the meeting happens more or less naturally. It’s tempting to replace this with an asynchronous check, like status-report emails, but Fox advocates that teams stick to the ritual. &ldquo;The team needs to check-in frequently &mdash; we recommend daily 5-minute stand-ups &mdash; so that any red flags can be spotted early. Even part-time teams can find 5 minutes a day that the whole team is available. Email isn’t good for this; an interactive meeting, where people can also mention blocking items and others can immediately speak up with suggestions, is the best format,&rdquo; he wrote.</p>

<p>For a part-time team, it may also be tempting to do away with regular meetings entirely and rely solely on the start and end of sprint check-ins. Fox warns that &ldquo;every team [that he has] coached at Berkeley has said that they quickly realized that once-a-week team meetings were nowhere near enough to keep everyone on the same page.&rdquo;</p>

<p>Sprint reviews and retrospectives are important components of Agile. If teams do not regularly evaluate their working practices and performance, bad interactions will continue unchecked and discontent will grow. However, the velocity measurement and end-of-sprint re-assignment tasks can be handled by the scrum master outside of meeting times, and the team leader can use one-on-one meetings and their perception of team mood in stand-ups and sprint planning to reduce the need for sprint review and retrospective.</p>

<p>If you absolutely need to cut back on the number and duration of Agile meetings, cut review and retrospective first. That said, it is important to celebrate the team’s progress each sprint and give people space to air grievances. A decent compromise can be to extend the last stand-up of each sprint to accomplish this communication within the team.</p>

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<h3 id="defining-roles-on-a-part-time-agile-team">Defining Roles On A Part-Time Agile Team</h3>

<p>This section depends entirely on the composition of the team. However, there are a few useful heuristics for assigning roles. Responsibilities assigned should minimize communication overhead (which scales worse-than-linearly with team size), fit individual contributors&rsquo; abilities, and account for team members&rsquo; schedules and availability.</p>

<p>For this section, I turned to Professor Barbara Johnson, who teaches a team software development course that I am currently enrolled in at Grinnell College. She wrote &ldquo;I have sometimes seen teams come to rely upon what might be called a &lsquo;chief organizer&rsquo; who combines the roles of not only a scrum master (who organizes the team) but also the product owner (who coordinates and documents the client’s needs and feedback). This lessens the cognitive overhead of the rest of the team, who then can focus more on moving the project’s code and testing suite forward with each iteration.&rdquo; This matches my experience with part-time teams.</p>

<p>If possible, condense the managerial positions (team lead, product manager, scrum master) into a single role and assign that role to the &ldquo;fullest-time&rdquo; team member. If you have a team of 10 where only 1 person is full-time or otherwise has greater availability, that person should have as many organizational and communication responsibilities as feasible. Part-time teams require just as much communication as full-time teams and an even greater logistical effort, so concentrating that work in one person massively reduces communication overhead.</p>

<p>However, frequently this isn’t possible, either because no one has extra availability or because those people are better suited to individual contributor roles. In that case, I still advocate for condensing managerial responsibilities as much as possible but breaking the product owner back out into its own role. In this case, it’s important to be realistic when estimating how much further work these people will be able to do on user stories considering their other work for the team and client.</p>

<p>Most of the members of the part-time team will be individual contributors. There are two competing philosophies for individual contributors: generalist teams and teams of specialists. Imagine that your team is developing a web application. A generalist team would be composed of entirely full-stack developers. These developers would never be blocked on others&rsquo; work as, in theory, they are equally comfortable on anything from design to deployment. Alternately, if a designer, front-end engineer, back-end engineer, and site reliability engineer comprise a team, they will be fast and effective at their own work because they only spend their time on the thing that they’re best at.</p>

<p>As a team organizer, you may find yourself with a team of generalists, a team of specialists, or a mix. Putting together a part-time team of solid performers is hard enough without restricting yourself to one type of individual contributor, so, fortunately, both types bring something useful to the table. If you can recognize which of your individual contributors are generalists and which are specialists, you can assign tasks more effectively to maximize the impact of their limited work time.</p>

<p>Finally, on teams where people are working ten or fewer hours per week, it is tempting to throw out roles entirely and just say &ldquo;do what you can.&rdquo; Per our theme, these super-part-time teams need even more structured communication but have even less time for it. If everyone has such limited, scattered availability that you cannot justify assigning roles at all, it’s probably worth re-examining the structure, goals, and feasibility of the project.</p>

<figure class="

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<a href="https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/6f510c00-a18e-41c2-87fc-899948283ffe/man-saulo-mohana-unsplash.jpg">

<img
srcset="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/6f510c00-a18e-41c2-87fc-899948283ffe/man-saulo-mohana-unsplash.jpg 400w,
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src="https://res.cloudinary.com/indysigner/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto/w_400/https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/6f510c00-a18e-41c2-87fc-899948283ffe/man-saulo-mohana-unsplash.jpg"
sizes="100vw"
alt="'At the bustling Times Square' by Saulo Mohana on Unsplash"
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</a>

<figcaption class="op-vertical-bottom">
(Image credit: ‘Saulo Mohana’ on <a href='https://unsplash.com/'>Unsplash</a>) (<a href='https://cloud.netlifyusercontent.com/assets/344dbf88-fdf9-42bb-adb4-46f01eedd629/6f510c00-a18e-41c2-87fc-899948283ffe/man-saulo-mohana-unsplash.jpg'>Large preview</a>)
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</figure>

<h3 id="client-communication">Client Communication</h3>

<p>Software development is slow, complex work, and part-time teams only magnify that truth. Agile includes the client in the process by writing user stories, rapid prototyping, a quick release schedule, and consistent communication.</p>

<p>As a part-time team, communicate reasonable expectations to the client. For a half-time team, remember that development time is cut by more than half, build an extra buffer into doubled estimates. As development time is limited, it is critical to solicit complete, accurate specifications when meeting with the client or end-users to avoid wasting your efforts.</p>

<p>Don’t let part-time work make you fall behind on client communication. Even if there is very little progress to report, soliciting regular feedback and posting updates at a reasonable cadence should increase the client’s patience with the slow development pace.</p>

<h3 id="conclusion-goals-methods">Conclusion: Goals &gt; Methods</h3>

<p>You can get a lot done in a part-time schedule. Outside of coding, 10-20 hours per week is enough time to train for a first marathon. With a strong team and good working practices, it is enough time to bring a great product to the market. Using Agile to encourage up-front planning and continuous check-ins with user stories, regular stand-ups, and well-defined roles will allow even part-time teams to overcome communication barriers and work effectively towards a shared goal.</p>

<h4><span class="rh">Further Reading</span> on SmashingMag:</h4>

<ul>
<li><a title="Read 'Bringing A Healthy Code Review Mindset To Your Team'" href="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/06/bringing-healthy-code-review-mindset/" rel="bookmark">Bringing A Healthy Code Review Mindset To Your Team</a></li>
<li><a title="Read 'Creating Authentic Human Connections Within A Remote Team'" href="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/08/creating-authentic-human-connections-remote-team/" rel="bookmark">Creating Authentic Human Connections Within A Remote Team</a></li>
<li><a title="Read 'Building Diverse Design Teams To Drive Innovation'" href="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/05/building-diverse-design-teams-innovation/" rel="bookmark">Building Diverse Design Teams To Drive Innovation</a></li>
<li><a title="Read 'The Case For Brand Systems: Aligning Teams Around A Common Story'" href="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2019/06/case-brand-systems-align-teams/" rel="bookmark">The Case For Brand Systems: Aligning Teams Around A Common Story</a></li>
</ul>

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<img src="https://www.smashingmagazine.com/images/logo/logo–red.png" alt="Smashing Editorial">
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Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/amazon-alexa-skill/?utm_source=rss

Out of the box, Alexa supports a number of built-in skills, such as adding items to your shopping list or requesting a song. However, developers can build new custom skills by using the Alexa Skill Kit (ASK).

The ASK, a collection of APIs and tools, handles the hard work related to voice interfaces, including speech recognition, text-to-speech encoding, and natural language processing. ASK helps developers build skills quickly and easily.

In short, the sole reason that Alexa can understand a user’s voice commands is that it has skills defined. Every Alexa skill is a piece of software designed to understand voice commands. Also, each Alexa skill has its own logic defined that creates an appropriate response for the voice command. To give you an idea of some existing Alexa skills, they include:

ordering pizza at Domino’s Pizza
calling for an Uber
telling you your horoscope

So as said, we can develop our own custom skills fitted to our need with the Alexa Skill Kit, a collection of APIs and tools designed for this purpose. The ASK includes tools like speech recognition, text-to-speech encoding, and natural language processing. The kit should get any developer started quickly with developing their own custom skill.

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a basic “get a fact” Alexa skill. In short, we can ask Alexa to present us with a random cat fact. The complete code for completing our task can be found on GitHub. Before we get started, let’s make sure we understand the Alexa skill terminology.

Mastering Alexa Skill Terminology

First, let’s learn how a user can interact with a custom skill. This will be important for understanding the different concepts related to skills.

In order to activate a particular skill, the user has to call Alexa and ask to open a skill. For example: “Alexa, open cat fact”. By doing this, we’re calling the invocation name of the skill. Basically, the invocation name can be seem as the name of the application.

Now that we’ve started the right skill, we have access to the voice intents/commands the skill understands. As we want to keep things simple, we define a “Get Cat Fact” intent. However, we need to provide sample sentences to trigger the intent. An intent can be triggered by many example sentences, also called utterances. For example, a user might say “Give a fact”. Therefore, we define the following example sentences:

“Tell a fact”
“Give a cat fact”
“Give a fact”

It’s even possible to combine the invocation name with an intent like this: “Alexa, ask Cat Fact to give a fact”.

Now that we know the difference between an invocation name and intent, let’s move on to creating your first Alexa skill.

Creating an Amazon Developer Account

To get started, we need an Amazon Developer Account. If you have one, you can skip this section.

Signing up for an Amazon Developer account is a three-step process. Amazon requires some personal information, accepting the terms of service, and providing a payment method. The advantage of signing up for an Amazon Developer account is that you get access to a plethora of other Amazon services. Once the signup has been successfully completed, you’ll see the Amazon Developer dashboard.

Log yourself in to the dashboard and click on the Developer Console button in the top-right corner.

Next up, we want to open the Alexa Skills Kit.

If you were unable to open the Alexa Skills Kit, use this link.

In the following section, we’ll create our actual skill.

Creating Our First Custom Alexa Skill

Okay, we’re set to create our first custom Alexa skill. Click the blue button Create Skill to open up the menu for creating a new skill.

Firstly, it will prompt us for the name of our skill. As you already know, we want random cat facts and therefore call the skill custom cat fact (we can’t use cat fact as that’s a built-in skill for Alexa devices). Next, it prompts us to pick a model for your skill. We can choose between some predefined models or go for a custom model that gives us full flexibility. As we don’t want to be dealing with code we don’t need, we go for the Custom option.

Note: If you choose a predefined skill, you get a list of interaction models and example sentences (utterances). However, even the custom skill is equipped with the most basic intents like Cancel, Help, NavigateHome, and Stop.

Next, we need to pick a way to host our skill. Again, we don’t want to overcomplicate things and pick the Alexa-Hosted (Node.js) option. This means we don’t have to run a back end ourselves that requires some effort to make it “Alexa compliant”. It means you have to format the response according to the Amazon Alexa standards for a device to understand this. The Alexa-hosted option will:

host skills in your account up to the AWS Free Tier limits and get you started with a Node.js template. You will gain access to an AWS Lambda endpoint, 5 GB of media storage with 15 GB of monthly data transfer, and a table for session persistence.

Okay, now that all settings are in place, you can click the Create Skill button in the top-right corner of the screen. This button will generate the actual skill in our Amazon Developer account.

Modifying Your First Alexa Skill

Now if you navigate to the Alexa Developer Console, you’ll find your skill listed there. Click the edit button to start modifying the skill.

Next, Amazon will display the build tab for the Cat Fact skill. On the left-hand side, you’ll find a list of intents that are defined for the skill. As said before, by default the Alexa Skills Kit generates a Cancel, Stop, Help, and NavigateHome intent. The first three are helpful for a user that wants to quit the skill or doesn’t know how to use it. The last one, NavigateHome, is only used for complex skills that involve multiple steps.

Step 1: Verify Invocation Name

First of all, let’s verify if the invocation name for the skill is correct. The name should say “custom cat fact”.

In case you change the name, make sure to hit the Save Model button on top of the page.

The post How to Build Your First Amazon Alexa Skill appeared first on SitePoint.