Introduction to Temporal Nexus (Replay 2026 Workshop)

A 3.5-hour hands-on workshop that introduces Temporal Nexus through a payment-processing scenario. Attendees decouple a monolith into two namespace-isolated services connected by a Nexus Endpoint, then layer in asynchronous Operations, human-in-the-loop Updates, lifecycle controls (cancellation, errors, circuit breaker), and a polyglot connector demo where the same Service contract is fulfilled by a Java handler.

This repo holds the lab definition, slide deck, and sandbox image build. It does not hold the Python or Java exercise code that attendees write against; that lives in the companion code repo (see Companion repos).

Audience

Software engineers comfortable with the core Temporal model (Workflows, Activities, Workers, Signals, Queries, Updates) but new to Nexus. Comfortable reading Python. The polyglot demo is read-only Java.

How the workshop is delivered

Three coordinated runtime surfaces. Each one lives in its own top-level directory.

flowchart LR
  A[Slidev deck<br/>slides/] -- transitions to --> B[AhaSlides quiz<br/>off-repo]
  B -- transitions back to --> A
  A -- transitions to --> C[Instruqt lab<br/>instruqt/]
  C -- transitions back to --> A

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Surface	Source	What it is
Slidev deck	slides/	The lecture deck. Slides for concept introductions, reviews, and chapter transitions. Vendored Temporal theme at slides/theme-temporal/.
Instruqt lab	instruqt/	The hands-on lab. Each numbered directory (01-run-monolith/ through 09-what-next/) is one challenge with assignment.md, setup-workshop, cleanup-workshop, and solve-workshop.
AhaSlides	off-repo, presentation id 9123470	The audience-response polls and graded quizzes. Specced slide-by-slide in aha.md. The Slidev deck has dedicated transition slides at every AhaSlides switch point.

Repo layout

Path	Purpose
course-plan.md	Canonical course design: competencies, learning objectives, timing
aha.md	AhaSlides slide-by-slide spec
CLAUDE.md	Authoring guide for AI agents (slide register, vocabulary, brand rules, conventions)
instruqt/track.yml	Track manifest (slug, id, tags, sandbox config)
instruqt/config.yml	Sandbox container image pin
instruqt/track_scripts/	Global setup/cleanup that runs once per session
instruqt/NN-*/assignment.md	Per-chapter challenge body and frontmatter
slides/slides.md	Slidev master deck (imports chapters via src:)
slides/chapters/*.md	Per-chapter slide content and speaker notes
slides/theme-temporal/	Vendored Temporal theme (workshop-customized)
slides/DEPLOY.md	VPS hosting guide for live presenter-follow during the workshop
docker/Dockerfile	Sandbox image build
.github/workflows/build-image.yml	CI for the sandbox image
justfile	All build, push, and dev recipes

Quick start

All recipes live in justfile. Run from anywhere in the repo.

Instruqt track

Requires the Instruqt CLI and a one-time instruqt auth login.

just push          # push instruqt/ to Instruqt
just pull          # pull canonical state from Instruqt
just validate      # validate locally without pushing
just diff          # diff local vs deployed

After the first push, Instruqt writes an id: back into instruqt/track.yml. Commit it so subsequent pushes update the same track.

Slidev deck

just slides-install    # pnpm install (run once, or after pulling theme changes)
just slides-dev        # start dev server on http://localhost:3030
just slides-build      # static build into slides/dist/

The deck has additional pnpm scripts inside slides/:

cd slides
pnpm export                                # build the PDF (uses playwright-chromium)
pnpm build -- --without-notes --download   # public artifact: notes stripped, PDF baked in

Live hosting during the workshop

For live presenter-follow (you advance, attendees who clicked "follow" advance with you), see slides/DEPLOY.md. Caddy on :443 reverse-proxies HTTPS and WebSockets to the Slidev dev server on localhost:3030; the PDF lives at URL/export.pdf.

Sandbox image

docker/Dockerfile builds the Instruqt sandbox image. The image bakes the Python source from the companion code repo into /opt/workshop, pre-warms the uv venv, and builds the Java polyglot worker.

CI (.github/workflows/build-image.yml) rebuilds the image on push to main when docker/** or the workflow file changes. It is also manually triggerable via workflow_dispatch from the GitHub Actions UI, with an optional code_ref input to pick the code-repo ref to bake in. There is no repository_dispatch from the code repo; republishing after a code-repo change is a deliberate manual click.

instruqt/config.yml pins the sandbox containers to ghcr.io/temporalio/workshop-nexus-intro-sandbox:<tag>. Update the tag here when you cut a new image.

Companion repos

Repo	Contents
temporalio/workshop-nexus-intro-code	The Python and Java exercise code attendees work through. Baked into the sandbox image at build time.

Authoring and contributing

• Slide and lab conventions (workshop register, vocabulary, brand rules, font sizes, the "handler vs implementer" disambiguation) are documented in CLAUDE.md. Read it before editing slides or labs, even if you are not using an AI agent. It is the canonical style guide.
• Course design rationale (why a chapter exists, what it teaches, where it fits in the 3.5-hour arc) lives in course-plan.md.
• AhaSlides integration is specced in aha.md. Every Slidev transition slide that hands off to AhaSlides has matching speaker notes scripting the lead-in and lead-out.

License

MIT.