I was fortunate to attend ExploreDDD last week (April 16-17) and I have so many thoughts. First and foremost, this group was one of the most thoughtful and welcoming groups I’ve experienced in tech. It was very reminiscent of Code4Lib, which if you’re not familiar with, a group of “hackers, designers, architects, curators, catalogers, artists and instigators from around the world” that happen to fit in the Venn overlap of libraries, archives, museums, and technology. I bring up the Code4Lib conferences because they were so invigorating. I always came away with new friends, connections, ideas, and most importantly motivation. Motivation can be a hard thing to come across these days, so when you tap into it, you tend to get overwhelmed. Your brain fills up, bursts, then fills up again. You hit the pillow and don’t move until your alarm goes off in the morning and you exciting for it to happen all over again.
That’s what going to ExploreDDD felt like for me. So, yeah…highly recommended.
Domain-driven Design (DDD) is not so much a technology as it is a philosophy. It’s a way of thinking to help you make sense of a complicated world. If I could only have one takeaway from the conference is that the world is messy, your systems are messy, your people are messy and we have tools, frameworks, patterns, mental models, and processes to help. Nobody ever said it was gonna be easy. Do the work. Build the models. Map the systems. Create the Event Storm. Most importantly, share the work. Allow it to be challenged. Improve it through feedback and know now that everybody has a better understanding of the system.
I’ll give the rundown of what I attended and then make as many posts as needed to put more thoughts out into the world.
Wednesday, April 16
- Architecture Is Designing Knowledge Flow by Diana Montalion (Thomas Betts already did a great writeup of this opening keynote for InfoQ)
- Architecting Agility: How Software Architecture Influences Agile Practices by Joseph Yoder
- Making Your Career More Resilient by Nivia Henry
- Team Topologies And The Microservice Architecture: A Synergistic Relationship by Chris Richardson
- Domain-Driven Refactoring by Jimmy Bogard
- The Eventstorming Process Modelling Rat Race (Workshop) with Alberto Brandolini and Paul Rayner
Thursday, April 17
- Systems Theory And Practice Applied To System Design (Workshop) with Ruth Malan
- Discover Your Software Architecture In A Day With The C4 Model (Workshop) with Ryan Shriver
- Learning From Incidents As Continuous Design (Workshop) with Eric Dobbs
- Model Rigor, You Say by Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
The workshops were 2 hours and they really were work. The good kind. I’m not new to Eventstorming, C4, systems thinking, and especially incident management, but these workshops allowed me to hone my skills with experts and other practitioners which was incredibly valuable.