In this article I show a way to get start off with Alexa Smart Home Skill on a Raspberry Pi. Even though AWS offers a lot of documents but I did not find a comprehensive step by step tutorial for this topic. The issue is hardened by the many layers needed to get run a skill, which all need their special setups.

React recommends JSX to describe the UI but JSX is more than a nice syntax to convey DOM. JSX defines React elements instead of DOM elements and with that it combines the full power of React components such as lifecycle methods, state and children manipulation with a lightweight tag-based syntax. This allows us to factor out features without any visible HTML elements into React components and use them by composition.

Using functions in everyday programming seems clear at the first sight but often its connection to related concepts like scoping, closure and this fades into a mistique cloud. This post shows the most important mechanics of JavaScript functions.