Oblique Strategies

First published in 1975, the Oblique Strategies are a collection of brief aphorisms meant to stimulate creativity. Such as “Give way to your worst impulse,” “Question the heroic approach,” and “Work at a different speed.”

This project builds an Amazon Alexa skill around the Oblique Strategy API provided by Andrew Monks.

Let's get started:

$ npm install -g yo generator-alexa-skill 
$ mkdir chuck-norris-alexa-skill 
$ cd !$ 
$ yo alexa-skill

This generates a skeleton Alexa skill, with npm scripts for running tests, packaging and deploying to AWS Lambda.

Implementing the API calls is just a simple JavaScript fetch and JSON parse:

function getStrategy() { 
 return fetch(ApiEndpoint).then(_ => _.json()).then(strategy => { 
   const isBlank = strategy.strategy === '[blank white card]'; 
   return isBlank ? getStrategy() : strategy; 
 }); 
}

To package the skill for AWS Lambda, we just run:

$ npm run deploy