Storytelling and Code: Developing for the Amazon Echo

At this spring's Hack Upstate event my team build an Amazon Alexa skill. I came up with the idea of creating a murder mystery game that involved interaction with Alexa because I saw it as an opportunity to force a collision between the world I am immersed in (writing and content creation) and the world I am moving towards (programming and data analysis). I've been considering how these two spheres of knowledge interact for quite some time. My education in writing was earned through years of participation in groups, through classes and through degrees, whereas my education in programming has been primarily self-taught, ad hoc and in general, isolated, with only brief forays into makeshift classrooms. I've learned that these are two very different styles of thinking, very different processes and at times, contrast rather sharply.