Projects
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One year of learning from others about their experiences
The last year has been a fun ride. Since we open-sourced and started talking about the ideas behind Violet we have been able to learn lessons from the experiences of how some of the best Voice Apps have been built.
Not only have we built these into Violet, but we have also been talking about them at different places.
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A Voice Application Framework: Announcing Violet
For the greater part of this last year, I have had the pleasure of building a lot of Voice prototypes. These have included Alexa skills, actions for Google Home, as well as building standalone devices (powered by AVS) with custom wake-words and voices.
When building such Voice Apps/Skills, I quickly noticed the need for programming with a fairly powerful yet low-level platform-specific API’s. It reminded me of the first Web apps that I built, where we needed to program to the different DOM API of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.
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Architexa goes Open Source
The dream behind Architexa started when I was working on my PhD. I realized that as programmers, we often have to look at a lot of code. And, that if we have tools to help experienced programmers get a better view of the code (and in particular its architecture), we could save them a lot of time.The underlying stats are shocking – coders spend 5x as much time modifying code than writing new code and 3x as much time understanding code than modifying code (more – When Understanding means Rewriting). With that, the work started first as a tool (Relo) to create box-and-arrow diagrams (like class-diagrams) using the code as a guide. It then added another tool (Strata) to guesstimate a layered-architectural-diagram using code dependencies with heuristics for breaking cycles. And, finally with Architexa we added a tool to show run time information in code using sequence diagrams.