London Clojure Dojo Robot Tournament

I ran a session at the London Clojure Dojo recently using Matt Wynne's rather excellent robot_tournament server. It wasn't too hard to get things up and running on my laptop. Had to learn some new stuff about Ruby bundles but once I had I could get all the required gems down and the server was up and running. I ran into a couple of other wrinkles:

• curl on the mac seemed to require a mime type to be explicitly referenced like this:

  curl http://localhost:3000/players --header 'Content-Type: application/octet-stream' --data-binary @someone.zip

• as we were using clojure I had to up the rock-paper-scissors game timeout as JVM startup was too long

The session went really well and people seemed to be up and running much faster than at the Software Craftsmanship conference where I first tried it. I'm guessing that possibly had something to do with practising dojo style coding? I got lots of good feedback and we're planning to run some similar sessions in the future.