Serverless Conference comes to London later this month.
IBM will be hosting a full-day workshop at the event. Developers can come and learn how to use OpenWhisk, the open-source serverless platform.
I’m going to be one of the mentors on the day, along with members from the product team.
Working on training material for the session, I remembered that the Node.js community had a popular workshop tool for running training sessions around the world.
NodeSchool
NodeSchool provides developers with a command-line utility that helps them learn the platform. This tool provides a series of interactive exercises to test their knowledge. Each exercise requires the developers to write some code. The application can then verify their solution and record their progress.
The Node.js community open-sourced the tools used to develop NodeSchool.
Using this toolchain makes it simple to create similar exercise-led workshops for developers.
OpenWhiskSchool?
OpenWhisk has great documentation. The project repository includes Markdown files for each feature of the platform.
Would it be possible to use this material with the NodeSchool toolchain to create an interactive OpenWhisk workshop for developers?
Developers would review the relevant documentation for a particular feature and use the tool to test their knowledge through an interactive exercise.
Each exercise would require them to build, deploy and configure a sample serverless function which used that platform feature.
After getting set up with the toolchain and reviewing other example projects, we started work on it…
openwhisk-workshop
🎉 Developers can now install the workshop from NPM as a global command. 🎉
$ npm install -g openwhisk-workshop
This tool needs the OpenWhisk command-line utility installed and authenticated against an instance of the platform. For more details on getting this environment setup, see the following documentation here.
Once the tool is installed, developers can open the application by running the following command.
$ openwhisk-workshop
The list of exercises will be displayed, along with current completion progress. Using the arrow keys (↑↓) to navigate the menu, press RETURN to open an exercise.
On selecting an exercise, the problem challenge will be printed to the terminal.
Each exercise comes with a documentation page which explains the concepts behind the challenge. Use the following command to display the exercise documentation in the terminal.
$ openwhisk-workshop more
Once the developer has solved the challenge, they can verify their solution with the following command.
$ openwhisk-workshop verify
If their solution is correct, that task is marked as completed and the utility returns to the list of exercises. Developers can continue working through the exercises until they have completed them all.
feedback
If you have problems with the workshop, please raise an issue in the repository.
Need more general help with OpenWhisk?