Virtual Domain-driven design

Did you know that crows are better than toddlers at generating novel solutions? It's true! In the earliest days of childhood, around the globe scientists have documented that human cognition struggles to generate novel solutions. But we are adept at imitation, transmitting and teaching the solutions that we see others put into practice. What does this have to do with software, and innovation, and the cultures we want to create for the communities we love? I'm a psychologist fascinated by cycles of innovation in developer communities, and I think a simple reframe lights the way forward for our industry: in this talk, rather than focusing on what drives individual developer productivity, together we’re going to focus on the science of what drives developers’ collaborative problem-solving. We'll dive into the cognitive architecture of problem-solving, as well as what I've learned from leading empirical research with thousands of developers.Dr Cat HicksCat Hicks is a psychologist for software teams and defender of the mismeasured. She is the author of the Developer Thriving framework, the AI Skill Threat framework, and the VP of Research at Pluralsight. Cat is the founder of the Developer Success Lab, an open science research lab that creates empirical evidence about how organisations and individuals can achieve sustainable, resilient innovation in technology and create more well-being for technologists. Cat is also the founder of Catharsis Consulting, a scientific consultancy that connects organisations to human-centred evidence strategies. Cat holds a Ph.D. in Quantitative Experimental Psychology from UC San Diego, serves on the Advisory Council of the University of San Diego Center for Digital Civil Society, and is the author of a forthcoming book on the psychology of software teams.

Have you ever wondered about what makes a good abstraction vs a bad one? Do you want to examine potential reasons why efforts to develop abstractions at a company or in a project take hold, and some don't? Or what it takes to develop an abstraction that reaches beyond the technical corner of your company or project and becomes something that helps actually shape how you think about the entire problem? Understanding the process of developing abstractions, especially as a leader, is really about understanding the process of grief. Even if you get to build the abstraction, it won't be the one you pictured, or envisioned. You're going to need to take the seeds you've born, carefully curated, and lovingly built up over time... And watch them die. To build an abstraction is to hold the heart of your humanity in your hands. Plant your soul into the ground, and be reborn. In this session, I'm going to introduce my thoughts on abstraction, how it works, why it sometimes works and why it sometimes doesn't, and how one can actually take an abstraction and flesh it out to the point where it takes on a life of its own. With that, you should be able to have a better grasp on how ideas can take root in a way that bridges people and domains together. Hazel Weakly Hazel spends her days working on building out teams of humans as well as the infrastructure, systems, automation, and tooling to make life better for others. She’s worked at a variety of companies, across a wide range of tech, and knows that the hardest problems to solve are the social ones. Hazel currently serves as a Director on the board of the Haskell Foundation, as a Fellow of the Nivenly Foundation, and is fondly known as the Infrastructure Witch of Hachyderm (a popular Mastodon instance). She also created the first official Haskell “setup” Github Action and helped turn it into an active community-maintained project. She enjoys traveling to speak at conferences, appearing on podcasts, mentoring others, and sharing what she’s learned with the world. One of her favorite things is watching someone light up when they understand something for the first time, and a life goal of hers is to help as many people as possible experience that joy. She also loves shooting pool and going swing dancing, both as a leader and a follower.

Lorraine Steyn discusses systems thinking emphasizing understanding interconnectedness and whole picture. Topics include feedback loops, defining boundaries, stocks and flows in systems, conflicting objectives, sustainable change in systems, logical vs. systems thinking. Audience engages in Q&A post-presentation.

From example mapping, to BDD, to DDD practices like event storming and domain storytelling, we're fortunate to have a wide range of tools for collaboratively building domain knowledge and creating models of those domains in software. One gap that many organisations experience is the management of that domain knowledge over time. Domains evolve. Team members learn new aspects of the domain, or invent more useful models. Team members leave - taking knowledge with them, and new members join but never get the chance to participate in foundational collaborative modelling sessions. Living documentation is a set of practices to help ensure institutional knowledge is reliable, collaborative and low-effort. In this session, Chris will do some live domain modelling with volunteers from the audience to demonstrate a new approach to capturing domain knowledge as living documentation, and how to use open source tools like Contextive (https://contextive.tech) to help ensure the knowledge is absorbed, maintained, and relevant over time.

The strongest tech skills don’t necessarily guarantee success. To get the best from those around you—and maximize your own influence—you need to boost your tech skills with soft skills. Luckily, small changes in the way you work can produce big results. In this free webinar, Jacqui Read, author of Communication Patterns: A Guide for Developers and Architects, takes you on a whistle-stop tour of patterns and techniques to improve your visual, verbal, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills. You’ll learn communication soft skills tuned specifically to a technical audience, which you can easily integrate into your existing workflows for quick and transformative results. You’ll learn how to:     Use soft skills to boost your technical skills     Explore visual, nonverbal, written, knowledge, and remote communication skills     Integrate communication soft skills into your everyday workflow for transformative results  

Event-driven architecture experts Udi Dahan and Laila Bougria discuss the challenges of coordinating work in event-driven architectures. They explore the differences between orchestration and choreography, the types of events and their contexts, evolving contracts in a message system, observability tools, and the role of SLAs. They emphasize evaluating the entire workflow and the necessity of each step in complex workflows.

As systemic complexity increases around us, many technologists are redefining “leadership.” What is technical leadership when good decision-making depends on collective, cross-functional thinking? How is collaborative modeling a form of leadership? What type of leadership does a systems architect provide? Eb Ikonne, author of “Becoming a Leader in Product Development: An Evidence-Based Guide to the Essentials”, opened our open space event with a keynote. Eb will create the context for our discussions, describing adaptive leadership as something we can practice and a skill we can cultivate. This is the extract of that keynote.

As the relational complexity of software increases, we need, more than ever, smart architecture. Domain-aligned, team-decoupling, cohesiveness-driving, constantly evolving architecture has a massive positive impact. To design systems, we need to evolve the role of “architect” away from the dualistic most-experienced implementor vs ivory tower strategist.  Architecture is a technology-agnostic skillset. You practice it regardless of which tools or programming language you work with. Architecture practice is a solitary, intra-group, and inter-group activity. We practice it within the human system, when we collaboratively design patterns and relationships, empower decision making and construct cross-functional feedback loops. In this talk, we explore: * “What is an architectural decision?” (The answers might surprise you).  * How do we work effectively individually, intra-team, and inter-team to make them? * What is the “advice process” and what has it taught us?

Does your team suffer from: Inconsistent views of your systems? Producing incohesive solutions? Ineffective architecture practices and tools? Introducing Bytesize Architecture Sessions! Bytesize Sessions are a workshop format that enables collaborative and iterative knowledge sharing. This talk will enable you to run Bytesize Sessions resulting in the following benefits: Improved systems thinking. Enriching collaboration within the team. Understanding architecture practices and tools in a safe environment. A feedback loop controlled by the team produces better documentation across sessions. Revealing the Bermuda Triangles! About Andrea Magnorsky Andrea is a professional software developer with over 20 years of experience. These days she is a consultant / contractor focusing on strongly typed functional languages and software architecture . Andrea founded Kats Conf, Global GameCraft and many other communities. She also co-founded BatCat Games, a PC and Console game development company in Ireland.  

oday most software products are highly networked and distributed solutions used by 1000s if not -10000s of people spread across the globe. To produce an experience that is intuitive and delivers a quality service worldwide, multi-culturally, and 24/7 across all time zones, you need a multi-disciplinary and diverse set of individuals i.e. a tailored team. Join us in this panel with: Dawn Ahukanna Jessica Kerr Ruth Malan Rebecca Wirfs-Brock Mathias Verraes Trond Hjorteland