The recently held DDD Europe 2018 conference in Amsterdam was the third consecutive event, and saw almost 700 attendees. The conference has a focus on Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and this year it ran over two days preceded by two days of workshops.
The two days of pre-conference workshops contained eight workshops, among others:
- A two-day master class in Event Storming held by Alberto Brandolini
- One day about living documentation, where Cyrille Martraire demonstrated a way to implement documentation that evolves with the code
- Two days of creating event-driven microservices using Axon Framework, held by Allard Buijze
- Two days of complexity-based design thinking, ran by Dave Snowden
During the two conference days, three tracks where dedicated to 19 presentations. One track was set for open space where attendees could raise their own questions or discuss solutions, problems and challenges. 17 sessions covering five tracks focused on live coding or hands-on, where the participants could bring a laptop and do some coding.
Both conference days started and ended with a keynote:
- Dave Snowden talked in the opening keynote about complexity-based thinking, discussing strategies and how to work with complex systems. Snowden is the creator of Cynefin, a conceptual framework for helping people make better decisions.
- Eric Evans talked about the importance of practicing DDD. What he finds extra nteresting is taking a difficult domain and breaking out of the mental box trying to find new concepts.
- Avraham Poupko argued in his talk about the importance of multiple perspectives when modelling software.
- Jenny Quillien, Indranil Bhattacharya and André Kampert talked in the closing keynote about how ontology and ethnography can help in Domain modelling.
Besides the four keynotes, 19 presentations were held, including:
- Michiel Overeem discussing how to evolve CQRS and event sourced systems — based on interviews with developers about their practices and experiences
- Thomas Perrain presented his experiences from working with retroactive and future events in an event sourced system
- Stefan Hofer and Henning Schwenter demonstrated how Domain Storytelling can be a way of finding bounded contexts in a domain when working with DDD
- Debasish Ghosh showed in his presentation a different approach to domain modelling, using functional patterns and Scala
- Indu Alagarsamy talked about how autonomy and asynchrony is the key to designing reliable systems and argued that an event-driven architecture and asynchronous communication via events leads to autonomous and more reliable systems
The 17 hands-on and live coding sessions during the conference included:
- Extracting Bounded Contexts from a Meta Model with Michiel Overeem, Guit-Jan Ridderbos, and Gerrit-Jan Lubbertsen, where they explored how to automatically generate software from a domain model
- Distil the Core Domain from Your Legacy App with Thomas Pierrain and Bruno Boucard, where they used the Hexagonal Architecture pattern to separate domain and technical code
- Front to back Event Sourcing with Nicole Rauch and Arnaud Bailly, where participants implemented frontend and backend components from test cases
- Master your Domain with Domain Storytelling with Stefan Hofer and Henning Schwenter
Besides this summary, notes from four presentations are published on InfoQ. All presentations at the conference were recorded and will be published during the coming months. The planning for DDD Europe 2019 has started but the exact date has not yet been set.