Rework the Skill Development section

[krisgesling]

Mycroft has come a long way over the last few years and our documentation has not always kept up. Skill Development is certainly one of these areas. New methods and tooling are available for developers, but the documentation still encourages old (sometimes deprecated) practices.

We want to update this section of the documentation with a Skill Development series, that provides a really easy to follow tutorial for beginners, and progresses through the many components available in a logical and structured way.

This issue is an attempt to provide the bones of that structure. Dot points are listed as check boxes because each is a page of documentation that needs to be compiled from existing sources, or written from scratch.

Skill Development

Intro

• Introduction to Mycroft Skill Development
• Your first Skill - including using msk create and a brief run through of what this generates
• Logging
• Intents
  • Intro to intents - what are they, what are entities and overview of the built in intent parsers.
  • Padatious Intents
  • Adapt Intents
  • Mycroft Intent Service
• Skill lifecycle methods - init, initialize, stop, shutdown
• Skill settings - why, how, best practices
• Dependencies
• MycroftSkill methods available - directing to the technical docs

Managing interactions, follow-ups and conversations

• Asking question - intro to get_response() and similar methods
• Conversational context
• Converse()
• Communicating with a RASA instance

Automated Testing

• Replaced with Voight Kampff docs

Different Skill Types

• Fallback Skill
• Common Play Skill
• Common Query Skills
• Common IoT Skill

GUI and Display Control

• Mycroft GUI with Qt - 1, 2
• Controlling the Mark 1 display

Voice User Experience - Designing your Skill

• VUX Design Guidelines

Language and internationalisation

• Skill translation process
• Best practices for enabling broad adoption of your Skill

Skill Submission

• Skills Acceptance Process
• Required components for your Skill
• README.md tips
• Upgrading a Skill

Other (where should these go?)

• Specific how-to's eg setting up Home Assistant, or getting HA notifications via Mycroft

If any of these topics interest you, please consider learning about the topic and solidifying that learning by updating the documentation for it 😀

[jatin41]

I want to work