Last week, the Event Store team had the pleasure of attending Explore DDD 2024, a triumphant return for the conference in the US.
Explore DDD brings together an international community of industry experts, developers, software architects, business and technical leaders. Hosted in downtown Denver, the conference includes world-class talks and hands-on sessions in software modelling and design from pioneers, practitioners and innovators, as well as pre-conference workshops by experienced trainers.
Here's our round up of the event, and you can view the talks on Explore DDD's YouTube channel.
Ecommerce With DDD And Event Sourcing
Event Store's Erik Shafer gave a compelling talk on the use of Domain-Driven Design, Event Sourcing and related concepts such as CQRS within ecommerce businesses.
Erik shared his own experience working for an ecommerce start-up and described how his team adopted these concepts successfully, including the challenges, failures, and solutions found along the way.
Key Themes From Explore DDD
The conference was chock full of fantastic speakers and workshops, and our team attended as many sessions as possible! Our Head of Community Alex Rowell and our Developer Advocate Erik Shafer put together some themes they spotted throughout the week, and talks that revolved around these themes.
AI and LLMs
With an opening keynote from Eric Evans to start the conference and a panel discussion to close out the day, it’s no surprise that AI, specifically LLMs, were a leading theme. Eric’s talk especially focused on independent experimentation and discovery to learn more about how to work with LLMs, versus following the work others have already done. He also included a call to action for attendees to bring their work back to the community and share it so everyone could benefit, which resonated strongly with our team.
In addition, the team noted a talk from Phillip Bohnenkamp on harnessing ChatGPT and a highly sought after workshop by Nathan Marrs and Adela Almasan on LLMs and how to harness them. All in all, it would be no surprise to see an AI/LLM track on next year’s programming, especially if folks take Eric’s challenge to heart and bring their findings back next year.
Legacy Modernization
As long as legacy systems exist, we’ll continue to have conversations about how to modernize them. Most talks that were not focused on totally new greenfield development had some element of legacy system integration and working within those system constraints, but the talk from John Phamvan and Adrien Abrams “DDD Surrounded by Legacy, Govt Edition” particularly resonated with the team. This talk took a realistic look at implementing DDD in an organization that wasn’t ready for it and further outlined how they contributed to getting the stakeholders and system ready for change. Another standout talk on the topic came from Indu Alagarsamy: “How to Make Better Modernization Decisions”. The talk presented legacy modernization as an attainable but difficult challenge, and suggested methods to help scale the mountain.
Experimentation and Collaboration
Good tech isn’t built in a vacuum, and nearly every talk across the conference acknowledged that in one way or another. The team loved the focus on collaborative design and development, and noted several tools that are employed by practitioners to make that work easier. Wardley Mapping, Service Blueprints, and Double Diamond came up across multiple talks along with the understanding that enabling conversations between stakeholders and across disciplines leads to better outcomes across the board.
The talk by Jessica Kerr, “Experimenting in a Sociotechnical System,” connected all of these dots and more while covering what a truly quality experiment looks like and what we can learn from it. This talk especially resonated with the team as “you can’t improve what you don’t measure” is a favorite phrase at Event Store.
Bounded Context Is Not Enough Workshop
This hands-on workshop was put on by Alberto Acerbis and Alessandro Colla. Originally planned for 20 seats, an emergent sticky note based waitlist prompted the organizers to expand to fit 30 students.
Alberto and Alessandro explored the concept of Architectural Quantum (an independently deployable component with high functional cohesion) and how it can help to create a distributed system with a clear separation of concerns. Using EventStoreDB alongside other tools and a variety of techniques familiar to DDD practitioners, the workshop encouraged real-time questions and collaboration, and brought an energy we hope to see in future iterations!
Event Store Meetup
We finished the conference strong with a meetup on Friday. Despite the foot of snow that fell during the first day of the conference and the cold weather persisting, we had a great turnout of community members and speakers.
The evening proved the perfect opportunity to meet up with faces both familiar and fresh, and helped us connect with many speakers and attendees that we hadn’t had the chance to sit down with prior. We enjoyed food, drinks, and a few friendly games of billiards before bidding Explore DDD farewell.
Upcoming Events
Event Store will be at the following events in 2024:
Kafka: Current, 17-18 September, Austin, Texas
KanDDDinsky, 28-30 October, Berlin
QCon, 18-22 November, San Francisco