Amazon has announced a developer preview for Alexa-hosted skills. Alexa-hosted skills allows developers to build, edit, and publish skills within the Alexa Skills Kit (ASK) Developer Console.

Previously, developers needed to provision and manage back-end resources. By staying within the console, developers can quickly build skills and spend their time more on creating new features rather than managing their cloud services.

Uber becomes a Gold member of the Linux Foundation
At the Uber Open Summit 2018, Uber announced that it became a Gold member of the Linux Foundation. The company has also joined the Foundation’s TODO Group, which is a group of companies that collaborate on practices, tools, and methods for running effective open-source projects.

“Uber has been active in open source for years, creating popular projects like Jaeger (distributed tracing) and Horovod (distributed deep learning framework) that help businesses build technology at scale,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. “We are very excited to welcome Uber to the Linux Foundation community. Their expertise will be instrumental for our projects as we continue to advance open solutions for cloud native technologies, deep learning, data visualization and other technologies that are critical to businesses today.”

Oasis launches the Oasis Devnet
Oasis has announced the release of its Devnet platform. Oasis Devnet offers tools for developers to build and test smart contracts. Key features of Devnet include confidentiality frameworks, support for Rust, a contract kit, backwards compatibility with Ethereum, and resources and tutorials.

“At Oasis Labs, we believe in empowering users and developers to protect and control their data in order to responsibly enable data-driven applications of the future. We believe only a platform that is both decentralized and privacy-preserving can truly deliver on this promise,” the company wrote on its website.