I admit the dojo did not go well. Among the prerequisites communicated to the participants, there were only two things: Java 8 and maven. Still, almost none of the participants showed up with such an environment.
I had been thinking about creating a docker image, but it seemed to be an overkill. I still think it would have been. In addition, you still need docker on your machine which I think is rarer than Java and maven.
Probably I should have asked for the e-mail addresses of the registered participants of the dojo and contact them directly asking them to make sure that their environment is fine. And at this point, I should have communicated the GitHub address so that they might compile the code and run the tests before they come.
I could have also ported the code to Python to have even fewer requirements. I will do that for sure!
But this event was not only about the dojo, I also made a presentation about the basic ideas of graph databases. I mostly covered the topics of this and this articles. Actually, this part went well. I think that my audience appreciated the presentation. Only one person was aware of graph databases before and they liked the concepts I introduced.
That’s already a success, they had ideas to take away. On my side, I also learnt a lot and still gained some confidence!
If you’d like to do the kata yourself, go to this GitHub repository and get started!
