The sixth DDD Exchange Day in London is due on June 20th with Eric Evans, author of the original DDD book, as host. The basic idea for the exchange day is bringing the community together to share ideas & practices. Besides Eric, the list of speakers include among others:
- Martin Thompson, talking about clean representative models.
- Alberto Brandolini, talking about Event Storming recipes.
- Greg Young.
In an interview with Wendy Devolder, CEO at Skills Matter, the company behind the exchange days, she told InfoQ about her thoughts concerning the upcoming day.
InfoQ: This will be the sixth consecutive DDD exchange day. Is the interest for DDD changing, and if so, in what way?
Wendy: At the early conferences, attendees came to find out what DDD is. Today, it’s much more about attendees saying ‘I want to use DDD in my project, how can I do that?’. We have also seen many more major companies implementing DDD into their software. Eric Evans has called the DDD Exchange “a kind of check point” for him to think about the state of where DDD is today. He says that it’s easier than ever to accomplish the goals of DDD today - essentially “building rich, complex software...that really fits the goal of the business”. And so our goal with every DDD eXchange is to really bring DDD alive for people and make very clear how they can make DDD work for them and their business.
InfoQ: Are you focusing on any specific area or concept this year?
Wendy: Eric will be opening with a keynote that will challenge the fundamental assumptions of DDD. He’ll explain that DDD can only stay relevant if we continue to shake up this approach to software development, discarding the parts that don't hold up and clarifying its enduring aspects. He will dig down to the root assumptions, and challenge each of them. Shaking up DDD’s foundations, he may even inspire a few people to look further for deeper insight and a fresh distillation of DDD. He’ll be followed by a host of awesome speakers including Martin Thompson talking about what it means to have a clean model, and Cyrille Martraire, co-founder of Arolla, who’ll focus on how monoids are used for domain modeling in a style that mixes the best of DDD and Functional Programming.
InfoQ: Who are you targeting as attendees and speakers?
Wendy: We’re gearing this conference towards a broad audience including CTOs, project managers, software architects, testers and developers at a variety of levels. Because it is possible to apply DDD to so many scenarios, anyone will be able to get a lot of value out of the day whatever their skill set and expertise.
InfoQ: What do you hope attendees will bring home from the day?
Wendy: The DDD eXchange is so much more than just a line-up of fantastic talks about DDD. This conference is about people with a shared passion for DDD meeting, talking, sharing, learning from experts, making new contacts, partying together and starting conversations that continue long after the doors of the DDD eXchange 2014 have closed. The ‘park bench’ concept, which allows members of the audience to join and contribute to expert panel discussions, is a great example of how delegates get the opportunity to actually sit next to, communicate with and learn from world renowned thought leaders.
