Hacking about on AWS Alexa

First AWS Summit.
First Alexa skill.
First Node.js app.

That's a lot of first all at once. In any event, Jeff Blankenburg's workshop inspired me, and Memo Doring's workshop got things moving.

Then I hit the typical 'how the hell do I debug this pile of slag?' roadblock. Thankfully, Nathan Grice already wrote all that down. (the post is a bit out of date at this point, almost a full year after the publication date, but it's a minor bit of mental version translation)

Step-through in VSCode for Alexa Lambda functions. Now it's time to get this thing working!

Frankly, this same general setup probably works for any AWS Lambda function with the right packages; Alexa is just the use case that made me search for the environment setup. And, yes, this post is simply to remind me where to find the instructions later. Here's hoping the link-rot stays away for a while.