DDD Summit 2012 Summary -

Some time ago I was honored (probably because of some sheer mistake) to be invited to DDD Summit 2012 organized by Eric Evans. The event took place in Portland over the course of last week and it was an absolute blast for me.

From left to right:

Cameron Purdy - VP of development at Oracle [Blog, twitter]
Daniel Gackle - CoFounder at SkySheet
Randy Stafford - A-Team at Oracle [About]
Jimmy Nilsson - Factor10, Author of Applying DDD Design and Patterns [Blog, Twitter]
Rebecca Wirfs-Brock - Wirfs-Brock and Responsibility-Driven Design [Wiki]
Vaughn Vernon - Consultant at ShiftMethod, Author of the next DDD Book [Blog, Twitter]
Andreas Brink - Software developer & coach at Factor10 [Blog]
Alberto Brandolini - Avanscoperta, DDD Instructor and master of tomato [Blog, Twitter]
Eric Evans - Father of DDD and founder of Domain Language [Twitter]
Dan Bergh Johnsson - consultant and partner at OmegaPoint [Blog, Twitter]
Paul Rayner - DDD Instructor at Domain Language [Twitter, Blog]
Martin Fowler - needs no introductions [Wiki, Twitter]
Patrik Fredriksson - Consultant at Citerus AB, DDD Instructor [Blog, Twitter]
Rinat Abdullin - accidental visitor, Tech Leader of Lokad

In essence, we were discussing various aspects of DDD in small focus groups and all together, going out on hikes and dinners, talking, talking and talking. There was a wide variety of topics covered during these three days.

For me, this was an amazing opportunity to dive deeper into DDD nuances, practical experience and ideas shared by the leading thought leaders.

Outcomes and Commitments

Long story made short, there are some outcomes of this event that should benefit of the community (including some of my personal commitments).

There is going to be more activity on the DDDCommunity.org site, that might have felt a little neglected over the course of last year (with a lot of good materials being hidden by accident). Things will start improving within the next few weeks (more regular updates and more structured community).

I personally hope to contribute some small practical experience bits of community building from projects and groups on DDD/CQRS (i.e. CQRSGuide and CQRS Beers with awesome communities around EU) , Lokad projects and Distributed Podcast, maybe even bringing all these closer together.

Practical samples are a big thing for demonstrating DDD. We plan to bring them together on a github and refresh a little bit (may be even adding Scala/Akka implementation!).

My own Lokad.CQRS Sample Project is essentially a sample of DDD (with all the latest tech stack, cloud portability, practical things and even some DDD modeling toolset) that currently lacks the most important thing - proper domain model. I plan to fix this last problem by the mid of June, in addition to committing to things I've been delaying far too long (i.e.: articles and videos about the sample project).

More articles and materials about the Domain-Driven Design are expected be published; some of the topics were already outlined by the summit participants. There are plans to establish better environment for reviewing and shepherding such materials, which should definitely help.

I personally plan to continue writing about various aspects of DDD/CQRS+ES. Hopefully these new articles will start making slightly more sense due to focus not only on disposable technical details (which CQRS+ES is, despite all its coolness and cloud-portability), but also on strategic and design decisions governed by DDD. Besides, some more peer pressure is expected on them :)

There are even more cool long-term plans about pushing DDD and state of the art in the community, however they are long-term. Meanwhile, you can stay tuned for the updates via #DDDesign (I'll make sure that any official DDDCommunity news will be auto-published on twitter via this tag as well).

How does this look?

Published: May 20, 2012.

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