KanDDDinsky 2022 Watch-List

This is the list of the sessions I watched, some with additional insights, others as a resource. All of them are recommended if the topic is interesting to you.

All sessions recorded during the conference can be viewed on the KanDDDinsky YouTube channel.

Keynote By Mathias Verraes about Design & Reality

Thought-provoking, like all talks I saw from Mathias.

Connascence: beyond Coupling and Cohesion (Marco Consolaro)

An interesting old concept regarding cohesion and good developer practices. Fun fact: I had never heard of Connascence before, but two times at this conference 😀.

Learn more about this from Jim Weirich’s “Grand Unified Theory of Software Design” (YouTube). It is a clear recommendation for programmers wanting to learn how to reduce cohesion.

Architect(ure) as Enabler of Organization’s Flow of Change (Eduardo da Silva)

The evolution of the rate of change in time

“The level and speed of innovation has exploded, but we still have old mental models when it comes to organisations” – Taylorism says hello 🙁

Evolution pattern depends on architectural and team maturity.

“There is no absolute wrong or right in the organisational model of the architecture owners; it is contextual and depends on the maturity.”

This talk is highly recommended if you work in or with big organisations.

Systems Thinking by combining Team Topologies with Context Maps (Michael Plöd)

A lot of overlapping between Team Topologies and DDD

💯 recommended! (The slides are on speakerdeck.)

Road-movie architectures – simplifying our IT landscapes (Uwe Friedrichsen)

There will always be multiple architectures.

“The architecture is designed for 80-20% of the teams, and it is ignored by 80-20% of them.”

The complexity trap

Uwe describes his concept-in-evolution of a desirable solution that could help avoid the different traps. They should be

  • collaborative and inclusive,
  • allowing to travel light with the architecture,
  • topical and flexible

The concept is fascinating, with a lot of good heuristics. A clear recommendation 👍

How to relate your OKRs to your technical real-estate (Marijn Huizenveld)

Common causes of failure with OKRs
Combine OKRs with Wardley Maps

The slides are on speakerdeck. Marijn is a great speaker; the talk is recommended if you work with OKRs.

Improving Your Model by Understanding the Persona Behind the User (Zsofia Herendi)

Salesforce study: 76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs and expectations.

😱 what about the rest of 24%?!! Do they not even expect to get what they need?

Zsofia gives a lot of good tips about visualising and understanding the personas.

Balancing Coupling in Software Design (Vladik Khononov)

Maths meet physics meet software development – yet again, a talk from Vladik, which must be seen more than once.

The function for calculating the pain due to cohesion.

By reducing one of these elements (strength, volatility, distance) to 0, the maintenance pain due to coupling can be reduced to (almost) 0. Now we know what we have to do 😁.

Culture – The Ultimate Context (Avraham Poupko)

Why does not have the DDD community any actual conflicts? Because our underlying concept is to collaborate – to discuss, challenge, decide, agree, commit (even if we disagree) and act.

 

This talk is so “beautiful” (I know, it is a curious thing to say), so overwhelming (because of this extraordinary speaker 💚), it would be a failure even to try to describe it! It is available, go and watch it if you want to understand the DDD community.

This list is just a list. It won’t give you any hints about the hallway conversations which happen everywhere, about the feeling of “coming home to meet friends!” which I got each year, and I won’t even try 🙂. 

DDD Europe 2022 Watch-List

I attend conferences and open spaces for more than 15 years but I can’t remember ever being keener to go to a conference than the DDD EU this year. But I still haven’t imagined that my list for “watch later”-videos will be almost as long as the number of talks – including the ones from the DDD Foundations (2 pre-conference days).

I was so full of expectations because I would be a speaker at an international conference for the first time and the opportunity to meet all those wonderful people who became friends in the last two years! (I won’t even try to list the names because I would surely miss a few). The most often repeated sentence on those five days wasn’t “Can you see my screen?” anymore but “Do you know that we never met before IRL?!” 🤗

This was only one of those great evenings meeting old friends and making new ones 🙂 (After two years of collaboration, the Virtual DDD organizers have finally met too!)

But now back to the lists:

Talks I haven’t seen but I should:

  1. DDD Foundations with clever people and interesting talks which should/could land in our ddd-crew repositories. (In general, the sessions are not too long, I will probably browse through all of them.)
  2. Main Conference

Talks to revisit

This list is not the list of “good talks”; I can’t remember being at any talk I wished I wouldn’t. But these here need to be seen and listened to more than once (at least I do).

Domain-Driven Design in ProductLand – Alberto Brandolini

Alberto speaking the truth about product development is exactly my kind of radical candour.

Independent Service Heuristics: a rapid, business-friendly approach to flow-oriented boundaries – Matthew Skelton and Nick Tune

The tweet tells it all: an essential new method in our toolbox

The Fractal Geometry of Software Design – Vladik Khononov

Mindblowing. I will probably have to re-watch this video a couple of times until I get my brain around all of the facets Valdik touches in his talk.

Sociotechnical Systems Design for the “Digital Coal Mines” – Trond Hjorteland

This talk is not something I haven’t understood – I understand it completely. I will still re-watch it because it contains historical and actual arguments and requirements for employers on how they have to re-think their organizational models.

This is the longest list of videos I have ever bookmarked (and published as a suggestion for you all). Still, it is how it is: the DDD-Eu 2022 was, in my opinion, the most mature conference I ever participated.

At the same time, there is always time for jokes when Mathias Verraes and Nick Tune are around (and we are around them, of course) 😃