Practice Projects
Eight original, hands-on projects, easy to capstone. Each one exercises exactly one idea from the 17-step course by putting it to work on a scenario invented for that project — not the worked example from the step page itself. Every project ships with a reference solution under solutions/ so you can check your own attempt once you've made one.
Throwaway repo, small data first. Every project here is meant to be run in a repo you're willing to delete afterward, against data small enough to read end to end in one sitting. That's not a limitation of the exercises — it's the whole point. A graph you can hold in your head while you build it is the fastest way to learn what a graph actually does.
Work through Projects 1–4 alongside Steps 1–13 (the core path); save 5–8 for the second read, once Parts 3–5 are behind you.
Index
| # | Project | Difficulty | Time | Concepts | Maps to |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nodes and edges by hand | Beginner | 15–20 min | node, edge, direction, label specificity | Step 2, Part 1 |
| 2 | The ratchet | Beginner–Intermediate | 45–60 min | ratchet, durable history, non-improving attempts logged | Step 4, Part 2 |
| 3 | Extract your first ten facts | Intermediate | 30–45 min | fixed schema, extraction, rejecting out-of-schema items | Step 6, Part 3 |
| 4 | Merge without losing the trail | Intermediate–Advanced | 45–60 min | resolution, reversible merges, evidence over similarity | Step 7, Part 3 |
| 5 | Give every edge a receipt | Intermediate | 30–45 min | provenance, source records, schema-version tracking | Step 8, Part 3 |
| 6 | Feed a worker a subgraph | Intermediate | 45–60 min | subgraphs, bounded context, task-scoped retrieval | Step 9, Part 4 |
| 7 | Catch a lie with a checker | Advanced | 45–60 min | grounding, rejecting claims the graph can't back up | Step 10, Part 4 |
| 8 | Wire two loops together (capstone) | Capstone | 90–120 min | governance graph, arbitration, anchors, frozen nodes | Steps 11–13, Part 5 |
Each project page names its step(s) again up top and points to the course-wide docs guide for the exact link — that guide's roadmap is the single place step links are kept, so it's the one place they won't drift out of date.
How to use these
- Read the step(s) a project maps to first — the project assumes you've already met the concept, and won't re-explain it. Use the docs guide's roadmap to jump to the right page.
- Set up the throwaway repo the project's banner asks for, and pull in only the small starting material the project provides (if any).
- Do the project yourself before opening its reference solution. The solution shows one concrete, checkable answer to that project's own scenario — not the only correct answer, but one you can compare your work against.
- If your result diverges from the solution, that's not automatically wrong — check whether the divergence still satisfies the project's "done when" criteria before assuming you made a mistake.
Solutions
Every project's reference solution lives under solutions/, at the path matching its own filename — Project 1's solution sits alongside Project 1's page, and so on down the list. Each project page links directly to its own solution at the bottom.