My 3-Day Dive into Domain-Driven Design – Conference Reflections from Antwerp

As I look at the central station from the window of my hotel room in Antwerpen, vivid pictures of the talks and workshops of the last two days of conference pop back into my mind.

Since I never quite found the time to finish the Big Blue Book of DDD, I chose to immerse myself by attending the conference instead.

Here is my attempt to remember and capture the most interesting tidbits of content and material from the talks I attended along with links to the slides and books mentioned. I hope it helps you!

Day 1

A Hands On Introduction to Domain Driven Design and Hexagonal Architecture - Jeremy Davis

This hands-on workshop is perfect for beginners to DDD that want to translate these design principles to running Java code. It also showcases event-driven communication and hexagonal architecture.

All instructions and code are in a fork of the workshop repository here.

Interactively designing distributed systems integration with collaborative modelling - Kenny Baas-Schewegler - Maxime Sanglan-Charlier - Krisztina Hirth

The Boing 737 MAX: When Humans and Technology Don't Mix - Kyle Kotowick

An interesting talk about the causes of the Boing 737 MAX crashes.

Day 2

A Defence of Technical Excellence - Chris Simon

A talk about storytelling, causal loop diagrams and technical quality. By showcasing different system theories in causal loops on LOOPY Chris showcases the added business value of technical quality. The distinction of technical and external quality is made. A re-examination of the concept of iron triangle comparing it to its historical roots is done.

Model Drift and Software Attractors - Barry O'Reilly

A thought provoking talk about cargo culting in the software architecture industry, the confusion between cause and effect in the structure of successful software projects. He presents alternative ways to think about software.

Books mentioned:

- The reflective practitioner

Breaking conventions for more performant models - Cyrille Martaire

One of my favorite talks of the conference: Cyrille introduces how conventional thinking and representations of the domain get in the way of technical performance, problem solving or business value.

He then manages to demonstrate how good prompting can turn an AI assistant into a tool to help with Domain Driven Design.

Books mentioned:

- Domain Driven Development

My AI Learning Journey - Eric Evans

Eric Evans presents LLM and AI concepts and experiments, before moving to the presentation of a 'Domain Navigator AI' fine-tuned for DDD analysis of a GitHub repository. Sadly the link to this tool was not shared.

Day 3

Situational leadership - Beija Nigl

In this workshop the situational leadership framework is presented both as a generic method of leadership and as a tool that can be adapted within the context of the architecture practice. Teams of participants are then assembled to familiarize themselves with the four types of leaderships. The drawbacks and limitations of the SL model are also discussed.

The second part of the workshop invites the participants to practice Troïka consulting, a technique to brainstorm solutions to a client's problems.

Slides: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVIrzyUuo=/?share_link_id=555609064106

Books mentioned:

- The situational leader

Becoming a great team - Woody Zuill and Kevin Meadows

In this original workshop all participants are invited to work together on reflecting on how they want to be treated at the workplace - and improve the way they treat others as a consequence.

Collaborative tools and dynamics like mobbing, team flow and psychological safety are presented and personal experiences are shared.

I liked the optimism and benevolence of the presenters as they invited us to think on how to experiment in our ways of working and become better colleagues.

Books mentioned:

- Team Flow

Conclusion

As someone new to DDD the conference was tremendously useful to grasp the concepts and mindset while meeting passionate practitioners from Belgium and beyond. I also enjoyed the fact that the subjects of the conference could go beyond the sole scope of DDD and also cover technical leadership, problem solving, event-driven architectures and system thinking topics.

Feel free to reach for me to share your thoughts about the conference or share with me the missing slide/workshop links