As a fun project in some spare time, I recently worked on a way to tell Amazon Alexa how to talk to New Relic Insights and retrieve some high-level information about an account. I was just curious on what it would take to get Alexa to access our Insights API with a voice command and Alexa to speak out some result of this query.

You typically start by creating an Amazon developer account and register a new Alexa Skill with the Alexa Skills Kit.

As a side project, I recently worked on creating a mobile app for Android (and iOS to be completed). To be honest, the development effort was quite straight forward. The development stack focused on Xamarin, because I do not know a thing about creating a native app for Android nor iOS. But, I do know C# … so, for me this was a natural choice :-)

My knowledge in the area of Xamarin was quite limited and I did not create an app for Android or iOS before. However, the path from idea to prototyping was really smooth. There are a ton of kickstart packages out there and the documentation is amazing. You’ll find tons of articles, knowledge base and other posts that are really helpful.

Background and Basics

In a recent project engagement, we were assigned the job to migrate a COBOL-based mainframe application to a new environment. The core theme specifically for this project follows a re-hosting approach. The reasoning for this type of approach is agreed upon with the customer mainly due to time and cost.

Of course, the scope and effort for such a transformation is quite huge and there are many tasks involved for the complete application to run on a completely different platform. Some of the activities include: