andthennothing.net

I just returned from a two-day developers’ conference called Øredev where I had a great time.

The keynote by Eric Evans about Domain-Driven Design, or DDD for the abbreviationists, was great! He’s a great speaker and presented an interesting topic. I’ve heard about DDD before, but I don’t think I grokked it entirely back then. However, listening to the guy who came up with the concept is often a sure way to understand what it’s all about. I attended a longer workshop today as well which provided a deeper understanding. DDD is, to me, about creating and working with a model of the domain. The model is at the heart of the development and should reflect the domain as well as the software design. Another important aspect is the usage of a ubiquitous language, that the same language is used by the domain experts, the developers, and the code.

The critical complexity of most software projects is in understanding the business domain itself.
Does this technology help me focus on the domain?
Does it distract me?

Erik Dörnenburg talked about Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control and it was a good overview of the subject. And it’s always refreshing to see an IDE during a presentation. Erik used the Spring framework, and since I attended Rod Johnson’s presentation/workshop half a year ago I learned few new things, but it was interesting.

Peter Tallungs talked about a missing architect role. Where architecture in house building, and seemingly in the software industry in the beginning, is/was about user needs, requirements, and user interface it has become an engineering role in the software industry. Perhaps we need to have a role that more closely corresponds to an architect than the current “software architect”.

Rickard Öberg’s talk about AOP was the same as the one he gave at Expo-C. Fortuately, he’s an entertaining and interesting to listen to so I didn’t mind. One thing I think he stressed more this time was defining pointcuts using annotations, which seemed like the way of defining pointcuts. I remember liking using annotations the most the last time, but I don’t remember it presented as the way.

The other workshop (in addition to the DDD workshop) I attended was the XP Game. It’s a game I’ve heard mentioned quite many times during the last years in various agile settings. It was a great fun and good way to get a taste of the planning process of XP.

All in all, it was a great conference, with great topics, speakers and organisation. Hopefully I’m able to return next year (it’s planned to be an annual event).