I’ve organized a few DDDBE meetups in the past, and always succeed in forgetting something. Either someone points it out well in advance, or I end up stressing last minute. This post partly serves as a checklist for myself, but it would be a welcome side effect to also see it encourage others to help out organizing future meetups. Organizing a meetup is not rocket science, having a list of what to take care of is a good start. ...
Writing doesn’t necessarily always come naturally to me. It often takes me days, weeks or even months of toying with an idea, before I think it’s mature enough to put it down into writing. I can’t afford that luxury this time though, I wouldn’t think of myself as much of a friend if Pieter didn’t get to read this in time. I met Pieter the first time in a bar in Vilnius, December 2013, I accidentally ended up sitting next to him during the traditional pre-conf drinks. The first thing that stood out, was what a comfortable warm sweater he was wearing - I still cherish the memory of that grey woolen sweater on cold winter nights. I’m still unsure whether it was the sweater or his undeniable radiant charisma that made its way into my memories. When Pieter talks, people tend to listen, or at least pay attention. That’s what I ended up doing that night - listening, sipping in the knowledge, afraid to make a fool out of myself joining the conversation. ...
Third time attending Build Stuff, first time doing a talk. I’m happy that it’s out of the way and can now just enjoy the conference, but I’m even more excited that it was well-received! The talk should have been recorded, but you can already find the abstract and slides below. Last year I ventured into the domain of (online) gambling. Given that the industry has been around since forever, I expected most problems to be of the technical kind. As it turned out, the struggle with technology was only part of a bigger problem; to move forward we needed to fully grasp the industry and its consumers. Events started out as a way to dismantle a legacy system, but quickly proved to be an effective tool to gain a deeper understanding of our domain. Visualising event streams, we discovered patterns that helped us identify what drives different types of users. Having a better understanding of what customers are looking for, we dove into existing literature to learn which techniques and models casinos use to cater for each type of user. We learned how to program chance while staying true to the Random Number God. Even when variance is brutal, casinos have enough data and tools to steer clear from the pain barrier. All of this entails interesting problems and software, but isn’t my code damaging society? Or is gambling just another human trait? ...
Me and Tom just finished doing our Event storming workshop at NCrafts Paris. Although we made a few mistakes along the way, feedback on the workshop was great. I hope to put something out about what we learned facilitating later this week. People talked, discovered and eventually learned a new domain in under two hours. The domain? Two minutes before the workshop we found a domain expert prepared to talk about his coupon start-up. ...
I just returned from Croatia, where I got to speak twice at the second edition of The Geek Gathering. Being such a young conference, I had no idea what to expect. Turns out they have a good thing going on; a small, local and very personal approach to conferences. Speakers both local and international, covering topics that serve the community, not their employer. Together with Tom, I preached Alberto’s Event Storming during a four hour long workshop. As always, people were impressed by how quick you can gain an understanding of a new domain using this technique. Slides of this workshop will be online after I make some tweaks, and try it in Paris on Friday. ...
Monday, I and four others did a DDDBE session on the strategic side of Domain Driven Design. My talk covered the Ubiquitous Language, and can be found on Slideshare. I might end up writing down the content of the talk as well - some images are meaningless without words. Evaluating feedback, I think the biggest mistake we made was keeping some things too abstract - curse of knowledge at work. If we get the chance to repeat the session, we need to make sure to weave a practical story through our talks to make them stick.
At Euricom, we quarterly all retreat to headquarters for a day of sharing and learning. This time, I and others organized and facilitated an event storming workshop. After a short introduction on event storming participants were initiated to the domain of Cambio CarSharing - which is packed with behaviour. After that, seven groups of five (+ one domain expert) spread out across the office, and spent two slots of twenty minutes modeling the domain - with two extra slots for feedback. ...
I just returned from our yearly Euricom retreat. This year, all forty of us got to spend four days in the South of Spain. Where we had longish sessions and a few workshops last year, we experimented with shorter talks this year - a la lightning talks, TEDx style. This format made it possible for everyone to speak, but also forced the speaker to keep the scope of the talk focused, and to organize the information in a way that attendees can get the gist of it in only twelve minutes. This makes for high-energy talks designed to peak one’s interest, to share useful tips, to plant a seed or to pitch an idea. Covering more than just technical ground alone made topics extremely diverse; from query tuning to empathy, from automated testing to how to explain your kids what you do for a living, from personal kanban to juggling with a diabolo. Going back and forth between these technical and less technical sessions kept my brain from being oversaturated. ...
On our way back from DDD Exchange, heavily influenced by yet another immersive DDD experience, we searched for ways to keep the momentum going. Sure, we met up regularly for CQRS beers, but we felt that we could do more, better. That’s when we coined the term modellathon, something like a hackathon, but instead of writing code, we would build models. Thanks to the effort of Mathias, Stijn and Yves, Tuesday marked the first get-together of the Belgian DDD user group in its official form. Combell was kind enough to provide us with a location, while Mathias fronted paper - lots of it too, post-its and markers. ...
This is the second and last part of my notes I scribbled down attending the IDDD Tour. The first part was published last week. A better model Even if you come up with a better model, the fact that it has been the ubiquitous language of the domain for decades proves that it works for them. This quote bothers me a bit. There definitely is truth to this, but modeling an existing process often presents such a great opportunity to revise and improve it. Naked models don’t conceal deficiencies, inefficiencies and aberrations. Exploring alternative models free of habituation, politics and legacy is dirt cheap, while the outcome could considerably benefit all. It seems such a shame not to take advantage of this. As with most things, know when to pick your fights. ...