Terence Eden’s Blog

NHS Hack Day

@edenthackathon hackday nhs nhshd · 600 words · read ~202 times.

It has been about 6 months since I started my new job at NHSX - I've loved getting stuck in to the Health Service culture. But there was one thing I was missing... a decent hack day! I was delighted to get a ticket to NHS Hack Day. This is a quick post about the event, and what I learned. What's the point of a hackday? There were three common reactions from people when I said a bunch of geeks were going to an NHS Hack. Ah! But the real problem is [some incredibly complicated thing] -…

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Alexa Skills - get custom slot names using Flask-Ask

@edentalexa developer hackday nhshd python · 1 comment · 550 words · read ~487 times.

Amazon encourages developers to use Flask-Ask - the handy Python library for working with Alexa. Sadly, the project has been abandoned. They no longer take pull requests, you can't raise bugs against it, and the documentation is incomplete. So this is how I solved an annoying problem - how to get the name of a custom slot. Here's the code, with a fuller explanation afterwards. from flask import Flask, render_template, request from flask_ask import Ask, statement, question, session app =…

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