Justin Jeffress

Visiting Old Friends

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 03:30:00 +0000

Today was bittersweet. I paid a visit to CrownPeak where I worked a month shy of five years. It was my first job straight out of college. I learned so much from a team of wonderfully skilled and nice people. It was a wonderful place to work. They sold the company in winter 2015. On March 15th, the Los Angeles office will close. Many of my colleagues from the Engineering Team opted not to move to the new office out of state. I knew it was my last chance to see everyone all at the same place before they move onto different things.

Although I left over 5 years ago (time files!), it still felt like home. There were a few new faces, but the core engineering team that raised me was still there. A lot of the new faces were from CSUN my alma mater. While I was employed at CrownPeak, I suggested that we participate in the CSUN Honor’s Co-op to hire fresh college graduates. While I was employed there, we hired two developers through the program. I was happy to see that they continued to use the program and it made me proud to be a CSUN graduate.

It was great to catch up with everyone and to learn about the new projects they had built over the time I was gone. I was happy to see that they had moved from silverlight to angular.js for the front-end.

Sadly, I didn’t get to meet everyone that I had once worked with, since several were out of state in the new office.

I hope everyone at CrownPeak the best and may you all land on you feet and move on to something great!

Alexa Skills Kit Local Debugging

Wed, 01 Mar 2017 08:00:00 +0000

Today I’m proud to announce my first set of video tutorials have been uploaded to YouTube!!! I recently got into Alexa Skills Kit and got tired of uploading my zipped source files to Lambda every time I wanted to iterate changes. I did a search and found an article on how to set up debugging locally, but it was long, disjointed and at times off-topic.

I thought of a way to trim it down into a cohesive step 1 to done process. I split it into four videos and narrate every step of the way. The videos are included in a playlist on the SleepyDeveloper Tutorials Channel.

Click the Video thumbnail to watch: Debugging Alexa Skills (AWS Lambda Code) Locally

Check the SleepyDeveloper Tutorials repository for the necessary code to add to your project. All future tutorials will be added to this repository.

I’m not sure how regularly I will upload videos, but I don’t plan to stop here. I have plenty of more ideas stashed away. If I have time, I would like to re-dub the tutorials into Japanese.

Hello World!

Tue, 28 Feb 2017 17:00:00 +0000

Hello everyone welcome to SleepyDeveloper!

This my obligary Hello World (first post) using Jekyll.

I came up with the name SleepyDeveloper back in 2008 when I published my first iOS app, a simple tip calculator on the AppStore.

Since I was working full time, I was losing sleep working on my side projects hence the name SleepyDeveloper. I was delighted when the domain was available!

Nine years later, I’ve decided to turn SleepyDeveloper into a developer focused blog and place for tutorials.

While training people throughout my career and tutoring people in college, I came to realize that teaching is a great way to enforce my own knowledge.

I will be announcing my new tutorial videos here as well as posting about development and technology.

Thanks,

Justin