It's great to see the utterence/intent/slot model to be available outside of Alexa. It's been easy to work with so far in Alexa. And you see a similar model from Nuance with Mix, though Mix seems to be stuck in beta.
Lex looks alot like Alexa though the setup flow is a bit different. Also has prompts for each slot needed. That's nice.
I'm thinking of moving away from pycharm when this year runs out and moving to vs code + python. It has full debug, scm, virtualenv support (which was broken in pycharm 2016.x for a time) and intellisense. I would still use Brackets for html and css because I love quick-edit, the ability to edit a css rule or color by hovering and hitting ctl-e.
I've only used lambda with Alexa skills and the linkage is nice. We let lambda handle the static responses and delegate the dynamic responses to a variety of endpoints that provide the natural language responses. We include requests to help with delegation and keep the logic as simple as possible.
My only two complaints, python 2 and code deployment. From reading the responses it sounds like there may be options for both.
This goes along with a good site I saw mentioned in comments yesterday, https://www.goodui.org/. If your site was still up, I'd sign up. You might even go cheaper with something like a shared hosting solution, like webfaction. it's cheap, it's easy to setup stacks, you'd have plenty of space, and you don't have to manage your server.
Neat article, I miss the simplicity of the old machines as well.
I teach a weekend programming class for middle schoolers and the setup is a real pain. There's just too much stuff that gets in the way of learning to code. Our setup is Python 3 with Pycharm EDU2 installed on each child's laptop. for some lessons we have a Raspberry Pi (gopigo and minecraft) that the kids can control remotely using Python.
We tried using Idle but it crashes too much and is a bit of a pain to navigate with the multi-window display. Pycharm EDU is pretty good, but I haven't had much luck using it with lessons. The lessons take a lot of time to setup and sometimes just crash Pycharm or become unusable, holding up class. So we use Pycharm EDU just as an IDE.
I thought of using something remote like Koding or codio (I really like these options), but we have some lessons that require us to be local so we can reach out to our bot and rpi. A more lightweight IDE would be nice, something with nice debug capability like Pycharm EDU. These kids are sporting some really old laptops, hammy downs from older siblings mostly. Ideas welcome.
Lex looks alot like Alexa though the setup flow is a bit different. Also has prompts for each slot needed. That's nice.