Spring Boot Kafka Workshop
Learning about scientific thinking and writing along with the theoretical foundations are probably the biggest advantages of studying at the university or college. Nowadays, bachelor programs get reduced to meet industry needs. Still, it can be an advantage to have a practical workshop in addition to the theory.
On 26 December 2022, Agilino appreciated to College of Information and Communication Technology of Can Tho University for facilitating us to open such an informative and engaging workshop. We have already started applying some of the techniques and strategies we shared in the workshop, and have noticed a positive impact on students work. Our team organized a spring kafka workshop to share experience with the students about Working with Kafka and Spring. We were really happy that more than 60 computer science students joined our event on Monday evening to study more about practical network communication.
Tam started first by presenting 30min about the concepts of event sourcing in Kafka and why it is useful in asynchronous service communication. Especially for the students it is very interesting not only how to do it but understand the motivation why to bother with kafka.
After the introduction, the next point was for the students to try themself. During my studies it was hard to remain completely focused after the first 20 min after when lecture started. So for workshop we prepared some USB Sticks with latest Java, Intellij and gradle offline repository and a copy of our github repository to account for slow network. Together with a cheat sheet we distributed it to the students.
It is a good practice to follow Test Driven Development (TDD), that is why we provided all the unit tests and asked the students to implement some missing aspects of the Kafka Listener and Producer on the service layer. You can check out our exercise here.
The remaining hour we helped students to solve the exercise. We could form groups of 3–5 students where one person had a laptop. Sadly a small percentage had no laptop so we just spent some time talking about their programming experience and gave some additional information to solve the exercise later at home or in the lab. Since students from the second and third year joined and the programming language taught is C and C#, an additional challenge was also the Java language syntax.
At the end of the workshop, after sharing swiss chocolate and some small gifts to all students we also gave small prizes to the two groups which did the exercise best. A last group photo and it was time to part. Lastly, thank you for everything we hope there will be more workshops, and a sincere Agilino hope we cross paths again in the future.
Adam discussing the exercise with a student
Students focused on the exercise.
Linh helping students with the assignment.
Students working with Intellij.
The two groups solved the exercise fastest.
Workshop with agilino company.
