Devops, the software development methodology in which engineers are not only responsible for architecting and building software, but also infrastructure and operational tasks like fleet management, logging, and monitoring, can teach parents a lot about how to educate their children and be better partners in their development. In this process, developers take on additional roles and responsibilities from typical IT responsibilities in an effort to improve the end to end quality and speed of delivery of features for users.

As an update to my previous post on creating an Alexa skill to control Nest thermostats, in which we got an account pin manually, and used this for making calls to the Nest API, I was able to use the account linking methodology in Alexa to allow any user to authenticate with their Nest account, and thereby control their thermostats without this tedious step and code changes. Here’s how to do it.

Reminder, this blog represents my own opinions only and is on no way affiliated with my employer, Audible or Amazon. Still I think these thoughts are pretty common. In 2014, I moved from a software development role on my team to managing it. During the time since, I slowly began to write less code, made a concerted effort to contribute on some projects, pick up bug fixes on critical projects, help with low severity issues, and do some side projects.