I just got back from visiting Adelaide for DDD Adelaide. I was intending to go just to watch, but due to a last minute speaker cancellation I ended up speaking on Human Shaped Microservices, modelling, and where people have gone wrong by not learning from history.
For those who asked me (and the TL;DR) you can download my slides here.
This was my first time at DDD Adelaide, and I have to say a huge thanks and congratulations to the organisers, volunteers, and sponsors for an amazing event. Great vibe, a good venue, fantastic crowd, and importantly, good coffee!
I got to see a could of great talks, some highlights for me were:
Larene Le Gassick’s keynote “You are welcome in this world” kicked the day off. Through stories of growing up with a father who is blind, she demonstrated how small choices we make can have huge impacts, both positive and negative, for sectors of the community we might not always think about.
I really liked James Schulte’s talk on the modern container stack and how he’s led a platform engineeting team to create a seamless way to ship services with Terraform, Kubernetes, AWS, GitOps, and Argo (among others). I’ve not been on top of that whole ecosystem recently, and it moves fast, so it was fantastic to see the current state of play and a great set of tooling working together. So many talks in this space are either theoretical, or very surface level. This talk was based on real world experience evolving and supporting this platform over the past few years, so it had some good lessons in there.
Lars Klint is always an amusing speaker, so his talk “Houston, we have a deployment” was on my list. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting it to be a product advertisement talk, but it was news to me that Arkahna have launched a tool to do feature management and toggling, which does look interesting.
The last talk I saw was Chris Gilbert’s talk, horror stories of agile gone wrong. It was a fun talk and some shared therapy for many in the room. It’s frustrating that agile is so widely misunderstood and practiced so badly in 2024, even some of the questions and comments from the audience hugely missed the point.
But that’s a topic for another day. I definitely enjoyed the talk!
I’ve always been a fan of the community around DDD, and this was no exception. It’s always great to catch up with old friends and make new ones.
I had a great time, and actually fell in love a little bit with Adelaide. I’ll be back next year for sure.
