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Aaron Parecki

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  • Tacos
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Sat, Jun 24, 2017 6:32am -07:00
  • Tacos
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Fri, Jun 23, 2017 6:10am -07:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    at Nh Hotel City Restaurant
    Dusseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany • Sat, May 13, 2017 7:20am
    51.217138 6.802798
    Cobbling together breakfast tacos 🍳
    Düsseldorf, Nordrhein-Westfalen
    1 like 2 replies 15 Coins
    Sat, May 13, 2017 7:20am +02:00
  • Chipotle Butternut Squash Tacos
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Thu, Mar 30, 2017 8:54pm -07:00
  • Beer-battered Portobello Tacos
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Tue, Mar 28, 2017 7:21pm -07:00
  • Cuban Rice and Bean Tacos
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Sun, Mar 26, 2017 8:07pm -07:00
  • Corn chip breaded Tofu Tacos with Chipotle Sauce
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Sat, Mar 25, 2017 8:30pm -07:00
  • Day 14: Posting to my Website from Alexa #100DaysOfIndieWeb

    If you know me, you probably know that I log everything I eat and drink and post it to my website. A couple years ago, I wrote a small Pebble app that allowed me to quickly post common food and drink from my watch! Coincidentally around the time Pebble announced that FitBit had acquired their assets, my Pebble stopped working completely. This meant I no longer had a quick way to log food, and have to pull out my phone again to make log entries.This afternoon, Tantek suggested that I use my Amazon Alexa to post food and drink to my website instead! Of course this will only work when I'm at home, but it turns out that I'm home a lot of the time I'm eating and drinking. I also eat tacos every day, so it'd be great not to have to get out my phone during breakfast.So today, I launched Alexa integration for Teacup, the app I use to track my food.This was quite a challenging project given all the moving parts involved. I started by defining the voice interface I wanted to use. Interaction ModelVoice interactions for Alexa apps have to follow a pretty strict structure. Alexa doesn't support interpreting fully unstructured text, so app developers have to define patterns that Alexa can match on. Invoking any Alexa app involves first speaking the trigger word, followed by a keyword such as "ask" or "tell" followed by the app name, and then the pattern of text the app wants to match. So for Teacup, this results in speaking sentences such as:"Alexa, tell Teacup I drank coffee""Alexa, tell Teacup I ate tacos"This gets turned into what Amazon calls the "Interaction Model", and is a list of "slots" along with corresponding keywords for each slot, as well as writing out some sample sentences.LIST_OF_ACTIONS = ate | drankLIST_OF_FOOD = Coffee | Cocktail | Beer | Tacos | Mac and Cheese | ...Sample utterances:"I {Action} {Food}""I {Action} a {Food}"It isn't clear to me whether the list of keywords I provided is the complete set, because while I was testing, it managed to post the word "on" for the food, which is not in my list.AuthenticationThe next challenge was linking user accounts between Amazon users and Teacup users. Amazon provides great documentation on this, and thankfully it's all based on OAuth 2.0 rather than having made up some other model themselves. Essentially, the Amazon Alexa app on your phone acts as an OAuth 2.0 client, and you have to build an OAuth 2.0 server into your app that it works against. This is a pretty clever solution actually. Luckily, I'm pretty familiar with OAuth 2.0, so I was able to build this out pretty quickly.One thing struck me about Amazon's recommendations about building OAuth support in your app. They say that they'll launch your authorization URL from inside the iOS app, which is a known antipattern for apps in general. In Amazon's docs, it says "The user logs in using their normal credentials for your site." This is a really bad idea. You never want to train your users to enter their passwords into random apps. This is the whole reason we have OAuth in the first place!
    continue reading...
    5 likes 2 reposts 1 bookmark 1 reply 4 mentions
    Tue, Jan 3, 2017 5:23pm -08:00 #100daysofindieweb #indieweb #teacup #alexa #100daysofcode
  • Tacos
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Tue, Dec 6, 2016 7:08am -08:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    at Tilikum Crossing
    Portland, Oregon • Fri, September 30, 2016 7:08am
    45.504878 -122.667105
    Tacos on the Tilikum!
    Portland, OR, United States
    Fri, Sep 30, 2016 7:08am -07:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    This morning: breakfast tacos at the beach. Not pictured: 10mph winds and 55° brrrrr
    Cannon Beach, Oregon, USA
    10 likes 1 reply
    Wed, Sep 14, 2016 10:33pm -07:00
  • Tacos
    Cannon Beach, Oregon, USA
    Wed, Sep 14, 2016 8:09am -07:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    at T&T Tacos & Tequila
    Las Vegas, Nevada • Sun, August 28, 2016 8:20pm
    36.0956 -115.175842
    Las Vegas, NV, United States
    Sun, Aug 28, 2016 8:20pm -07:00
  • Tacos
    Portland, Oregon, USA
    Sun, Jun 5, 2016 12:44pm -07:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    Always tacos for breakfast
    2 likes 1 reply
    Mon, Aug 24, 2015 8:50am -07:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    at Austin Java - City Hall
    Austin, Texas • Mon, March 11, 2013 10:14am
    30.265045 -97.747105
    Tacos to go!
    Austin, TX, United States
    Mon, Mar 11, 2013 10:14am -05:00
  • Aaron Parecki
    at Austin Java - City Hall
    Austin, Texas • Fri, March 8, 2013 11:05am
    30.265045 -97.747105
    Picking up breakfast tacos! #sxsw
    Austin, TX, United States
    Fri, Mar 8, 2013 11:05am -06:00 #sxsw
  • Aaron Parecki
    Riding the #esri trolley to get breakfast tacos! #sxsw @ Esri SXSW #LavaHouse http://aaronparecki.com/notes/2013/03/08/1/files/esri-trolley-tracker.jpg
    Austin, TX
    Fri, Mar 8, 2013 10:41am -06:00 #esri #lavahouse #sxsw #sxsw2013
  • Aaron Parecki
    Riding the #esri trolley to get breakfast tacos! #sxsw
    Austin, Texas, USA
    Fri, Mar 8, 2013 8:41am -06:00 #esri #sxsw
  • Aaron Parecki
    at Austin Java - City Hall
    Austin, Texas • Fri, March 9, 2012 9:10am
    30.265045 -97.747105
    Breakfast tacos!!!
    Austin, TX, United States
    Fri, Mar 9, 2012 9:10am -06:00
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Hi, I'm Aaron Parecki, Director of Identity Standards at Okta, and co-founder of IndieWebCamp. I maintain oauth.net, write and consult about OAuth, and participate in the OAuth Working Group at the IETF. I also help people learn about video production and livestreaming. (detailed bio)

I've been tracking my location since 2008 and I wrote 100 songs in 100 days. I've spoken at conferences around the world about owning your data, OAuth, quantified self, and explained why R is a vowel. Read more.

  • Director of Identity Standards at Okta
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