Matt Kruse is a solutions architect, currently leading development on custom web-based financial applications for the hedge fund industry. In his free time, he seeks out new challenges and opportunities in technologies that have great potential but are not yet saturated with developers. After being an early adopter of Amazon Echo and getting beta access to the Alexa Skills Kit, he knew he had the potential to influence the voice-driven space and to help build a foundation for other developers.
After creating one of the first dozen skills ever published and building some skills for personal use, he saw that his greatest contribution could be in building a framework for others and in assisting the growing community of developers. Recognizing the unfilled need for a Node-based framework for building Alexa skills on top of AWS Lambda, he first created the alexa-app framework, and then the alexa-app-server container for hosting javascript-based skills. These projects and others they have spawned continue to be popular and are maintained by the open source community.
Matt has created a number of skills for personal use including integration with IFTTT and a “find my iPhone” skill using the find-my-iphone module, which he wrote and published specifically for that purpose. He continues to explore the potential of Alexa in new, innovative ways.