Hosting on Glitch

Alexa skills need a server to run on. Lots of skills use Amazon’s Web Services (wikipedia) as the backbone of their skills. It make sense, that way runs the whole show. You can expect they’ll make things run smoothly and quickly.

However, when I started looking at tutorials that used the AWS Lamba cloud computing, I was overwhelmed and started looking for an alternative. Which is where glitch came along.

Glitch is a web-based development environment. It’s where you can write code software which runs in the cloud. Currently they only support node.js, but it seems like other languages and platforms are supported.

One of the best things about Glitch is the community. They have an active forum, but even better is the ‘help me’ function they’ve developed. It’s simple to use - highlight a bit of code that’s got you stuck and raise your hand!

I took advantage of this early on in writing my first skill, and within a few minutes, another user was looking at my code and offering suggestions. Just what I needed.

The only downside I’ve come across is sometimes my skills don’t respond the first time they’re invoked. I don’t know if this is a problem in my coding, or because of how Glitch is setup. But this is a small annoyance in the scheme of things.