DDD Europe 2023 - Call for Proposals - Software Modelling & Design Conference

Call for Proposals

Submit your session

Before submitting, please read about what we're looking for.

Quick Summary

  • The Main Conference offers advanced 50min presentations and 2h hands-on labs aimed at expanding and improving software design.
  • DDD Foundations explains DDD in a practical way. This year it will be focused on live coding sessions.
  • EventSourcing Live advances the CQRS/ES community through talks that go beyond the introductions
  • The pre-conference workshops are 1 to 3 days and cover topics in depth: DDD, modelling, software design, architecture, programming, ...

Submission deadline: February 28, 2023

Speaker Events

We are running online sessions to learn about how to submit the best sessions proposals, about doing livecoding talks, and on improving your material. These are optional, but highly recommended.

Main conference (June 8-9)

This event aims at an experienced audience of engineers and architects working in complex domains (or aspiring to do so). Our mission is to explore software modelling and design in depth, expand and evolve it, and look beyond the boundaries. We draw inspiration from fields such as non-software design and engineering, science, mathematics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, ... We want these ideas to help us become better designers and modellers. We favour sessions about modelling & design over sessions adjacent to modelling & design.

Please submit:

  • Talks (50 min)
  • Hands-on Labs (2h): These sessions should consist of at least 50% practical, collaborative work by the participants. Modelling, coding, debate, practising techniques, ...

Some inspiration:

  • Software analysis, modelling, and design
  • Case studies, experience reports, post-mortems
  • Visualisation and collaboration techniques
  • Software architecture
  • Systems Thinking, Complexity theory, …
  • Product development
  • Testing and refactoring
  • Strategy, organisation, bridging technology and business
  • Distributed systems
  • Software design philosophy, psychology, sociology
  • Ideas that challenge Domain-Driven Design. Be prepared for intense debate!
  • Practical sessions
  • Crazy experiments

A great hands-on lab:

  • ...favours practice over theory
  • ...is focused on a domain, a methodology, or an approach, rather than a technology
  • ...can range from experimental to well-known formats
  • ...puts the 'work' in 'workshop': modelling, drawing, writing, discussing, coding, …
  • ...encourages collaboration between participants (eg pairing or team work)
  • ...makes you want to go to the office on Monday and change the way you work!

DDD Foundations (June 7)

DDD Foundations is a subconference focused on established concepts in DDD and software design: design principles, modelling, techniques, patterns, refactoring, testing, architecture ...

For the 2023 edition, we want to focus on live coding sessions.

Live coding offers a peek into the brain of the presenter in a way that talks do not. For the audience, it's a way to connect with your ideas in a way that gives them a direct link to their own day-to-day work. Live coding can make the abstract real, and shows that software design is rooted in the real world. And it can be exciting to watch: will the presenter reach the goal?

Live coding requires good preparation. It's perfectly ok to set up macros, snippets, and boilerplate in advance — maximize the code you write live to make a point.

Some inspiration:

  • Show how and why a design principle or pattern works (or doesn't work)
  • Refactor towards better models
  • Reverse engineer messy code
  • Algorithms
  • Write better tests, show or compare different testing techniques, test "untestable" code
  • Disambiguate language, separate bounded contexts
  • Show techniques and paradigms (test-driven, type-driven, FP, OOP, logic programming, eventsourcing, actor model, quantum, ML)
  • Show your heuristics and how you reason about solving a problem

These sessions should be understandable by people who are not familiar with the programming language you're using.

Pre-conference workshops (June 5, 6, 7)

These workshops are 1 to 3 full days. These are similar to the hands-on labs, but more in-depth. People buy separate tickets for this, so keep in mind that they expect high quality and relevancy to their work. We pay a profit share with the speakers.

EventSourcing Live (June 7)

This edition of EventSourcing Live will be curated by Oskar Dudycz.

InfoQ, in its Software Architecture and Design InfoQ Trends Report puts EventSourcing into the late majority, which means that it's already widely adopted. We want to prove that during the EventSourcing Live Conference by showing practical and real-world usage.

We're looking for talks made by practitioners sharing their experiences with the community and their case studies. It's a chance for you to go down the rabbit hole with the audience and share more advanced scenarios. We encourage you to bring more technical details to show your use case. Still, the focus should be on the architecture and pattern implementation rather than tech specifics. Talks can also bring other aspects that are useful for the EventSourcing applications, so CQRS, Event-Driven Architecture, Messaging etc. As always, we're looking for diversity in the content and representation.

For this conference, we are looking for advanced presentations on these topics related to EventSourcing and CQRS:

  • Real-world case studies, experience reports
  • Best and worst practices applied
  • Specifics of event-driven modelling,
  • Tooling and practices: CQRS, event stores, messaging, etc.
  • Distilling the essence of Event Sourcing (similarities and differences with other techniques)
  • Integrations with different patterns
  • DevOps practices (e.g. running event stores, blue-green projections rebuilds, etc.)
  • Handling Event Sourcing at scale

We're also interested in adjacent topics:

  • Microservices
  • Distributed systems
  • Event-Driven Architecture

If you're an Open Source maintainer of EventSourcing-related tooling, that's the right place to share your story. If you're a practitioner with an intriguing use case but unsure about your speaking skills, we can offer speaker mentoring.

For this conference, we are looking about advanced presentations on these topics, related to CQRS/EventSourcing:

  • Techniques, patterns, principles
  • Domain modelling
  • Code and implementation
  • Architecture
  • Tech to support CQRS/ES: databases, messaging, API...
  • Case studies, experience reports
  • Operations

We're also interested in adjacent topics:

  • Microservices
  • Distributed systems
  • Event-Driven Architecture

Programming languages & Technologies

The conference does not focus on any particular programming language or technology. If your session has code, participants should be able to understand it even if they don’t know the language or tech.

Spoken language

All sessions are in English.

Submission Process

  • Send us as many proposals as you’d like, for as many as the accepted formats as you like, before the submission deadline on February 28 2023.
  • Even before the deadline, we might start accepting proposals, so being early helps.
  • We might ask you to have a short conference call with us. Sometimes we like to ask for clarifications, or suggest changes to the contents or the format. If we contact you for such a call, it is not a guarantee your proposal will be accepted.
  • We’ll notify you at latest 60 days after the submission deadline whether your idea is accepted or not. We'll ask for a final confirmation before announcing you.
  • Even after you've been accepted, we'd like to help you make the most of your presentation or workshop. That's why we offer presentation support. We'll put you in touch with other speakers, to help you develop your material, be your soundboard, and give you feedback. We might also ask you to do the same for others. We've found that even for experienced speakers, a bit of back and forth can greatly improve the presentation or workshop.

Increase Your Chances

Evaluating a submission based on nothing but an abstract is hard. Help us get to know you and your ideas by:

  • Sign up for sessions about submitting a great proposal
  • Sending us links to your content.
  • Blogging about your topic.
  • Talk about it at a local meetup. There are plenty of DDD (and other) meetups across Europe, and most of them are happy to have new and inexperienced speakers.
  • Record your own video, ... Be creative!
  • We generally prefer talks that are not technology-specific, although exceptions are possible. Code examples in talks are welcome, but should be understandable by developers not familiar with your programming language.
  • Building a program involves lots of trade-offs, and often we have the painful task of refusing great proposals for other reasons than the topic. If yours is not accepted, please consider this an invitation to try again next year.
  • If you would like to pitch your product or service, we provide plenty of sponsorship opportunities. A 1-minute pitch at the beginning or end of your talk is acceptable.

Reimbursements

We'll pay for travel, accommodation, and professional child care, as well as access to the conference. If you have other requirements, please let us know.

Should I buy a ticket?

If you have already bought a ticket, and your proposal is accepted, we'll fully refund it. Or you can give it away to a friend or colleague.

Submit your session