Coming back from Domain-Driven Design EU 2026

This week concludes my first Domain-driven Design! And what a week it was. I’ve been to conferences before, but I’ve not often been so impressed by one before. There were a lot of incredibly interesting and thought-provoking talks and discussions, from some of the most known thinkers in our industry. Some of them I also got to meet! Next to that, lots of interesting people practicing in one way or the other organizational design, architecture and engineering.

Over the last years I’ve had plenty of abstact discussions about complex topics. I thought I understood those, but it’s only now after this conference that I really start to get what some people meant to tell me in the past.

I’m still structuring some of my thoughts, but there are some snippets I would like to share already:

• We cannot look into the future, and we cannot know how AI will change our work and our society. But we know it will change. Better to be sufficiently ready than to anticipate everything.
• We need adaptability. Adaptive planning. And we also need to calm down.
• Writing clearly is an essential skill, as it always has been. So is teaching.
• Mathematics is so incredibly useful, but not in the way many people expect.
• The Architecture Advice Process requires a cultural shift, and those take time. But you can get there if you keep on making one little step at a time.
• Informal politics can surprise you in many ways! There is a connection there with the book from Laloux and organizational psychology, but I’m not sure yet.
• Westrum’s cultural angle also is relevant to keep in mind when you are dealing with different parts of the business. But perhaps that’s mostly nomenclature. But culture in general appears hard to categorize, as there exist multiple. We do see patterns that optimize around fast-delivery, risk-averse, individual hero as well as others that say to be more holistic.
• Event-driven Architectures are a lot more complex than I thought
• Data Architectures and Data Mesh are becoming more and more important, changing significantly, and heavily relate to context/semantic layers, or knowledge planes, or intelligence planes (I have heard multiple names for it).
• Some people wonder whether Data Architecture should not be more like micro-services Architecture, but it’s not always that easy. These people also wonder why we have data engineers at all. There are some interesting notions behind that, but at the same time the problem space distribution/topology seems to look different.
• Semantic silos! Off course, again ubiquitous language.
• Bounded contexts are useful if your organization has ill-defined or shifting responsibilities. Or politics.
• LLMs are turning APIs into Schrödinger’s box
• We probably should be more specific how we are using AI in our work, especially when we actually depend on human-to-human collaboration. Perhaps that will become something very useful about AI; knowing when not to use it.
• Technology does not decide how it gets used, humans do. But somehow IT can be very self-interested rather than solving actual problems and delivering value to human beings.
• And so much more! Incredible. My brain though.

I also finally understand what a DDD aggregate is, a context map, Wardley mapping, and how that all ties together.

And, last week I managed to explore Antwerp, go for a long run and practice bouldering. All in all a great week, but I’m also looking forward to come home to my family!