Episode 5 - Vaughn Vernon on DDD/CQRS/ES

uh hello van i'm not sure if you're unmuted sorry no problem there we go did you get over your stomach yeah that was a really nasty um thing to deal with in the middle of a busy week but um for most parts i think i'm all recovered um thank you for joining and um i really wanted to do this podcast because i think the last time that we were um on the meetup it was really just a general talk and i don't think everyone got a really good idea of your background and how you got into all of this we talked a little bit in brief but i think you know having a an hour with you with a focus on where you gathered your experience and your knowledge and how you came to share it with everyone and how you ended up building products on top of all that to help people um i don't think that was uh a complete story and so i think an hour of of having you um kind of tell it all would be would be really um interesting i think uh for many inspirational at least for me and others and then if we have some time you know 10 15 minutes at the end when there is something from the audience we can take that and of course we're also on youtube if someone uh chat you know types in some questions we can address those but we want to keep it short and focused on you not be distracted by people that have questions there's plenty of opportunity other meetups your workshops of course and many other places where people can get a lot of your time to answer specifics so i'll do my best to moderate and um if there's a couple of other people that are regulars they'll also help to moderate so yeah um thank you again for joining and taking the time uh it was supposed to be wednesday it is a friday um hopefully you've also had a chance to rest i know you finished a whole bunch of workshops or are you still in the middle of them i think you're not only over the hump yeah i'm uh well yeah i finished last week but this week has been really um draining as well i've got some high priority things and of course necessary interruptions working on blingo so yeah okay well then uh let's get to it then and get um and get started so let's rewind back to um the really early years of uh you know where you grew up um where do you call your hometown now seriously i think it's important for people to know like you know we're we're there and you know we don't have to spend a half hour on it but uh maybe five minutes into where you grew up how you got into computers and uh the industry and all those things that kind of i know set it up set up your career for and the trajectory you took yeah okay well um so boy i was born in columbus ohio so if you ever uh see me tweeting about ohio state football you know you can probably understand and actually i haven't lived in ohio since i was 12. my father is well is a retired engineer and part of my childhood was following my parents you know other places so i actually grew up in kentucky from 12 on and uh so yeah i love ohio state football but i learned to love um kentucky basketball so it was like kentucky wasn't great at football i don't think they've ever really been very good at football but uh they're really excellent at basketball but not this year um but anyway point being um yes all these things you know they have uh some you know fusion on your overall life and um so i i think you know what was kind of um very influential to me um is that my my dad being an engineer um anna lancer there so he was into the civil side of engineering um i would go out to work with my dad and there's even a saying that some i i was probably four or five years old and i was out on a job with my dad and um a guy said you're pretty young to be doing this and my dad says that i said to him heck i've been doing this since i was two you know so so i kind of have this like technical dent and i wanted to be an engineer like my dad and so the plan was kind of like um university of kentucky has a really good engineering program or at least they did at the time and uh strange enough though i got this call after i graduated high school and it was a recruiter from a school that you know featured software development well well back then was called programming right and yeah and so uh they they invited me to to go to their school and i think it was more like a certificate program um not a i don't even remember what the institute was um frankly or i remember it was the bell howell institute but i don't i don't remember and you know if you've never heard of bell and how they used to make computers maybe they still do but um you know you probably don't hear about that much no anyway i didn't go to that school but it kind of got things you know turning in my in my head about huh you know they they're telling me that my aptitude is really good for this kind of thing and i don't know if that was just you know a line or um but i believed it right so i started looking at universities and whatever and um yeah so i got to this point where i had attended a friend a good friend of mine got me a pass to follow him around in his classes at a university just so i could sort of you know see what he was into and to me it just seemed like like more of high school you know i don't know how to put it it was just so ridiculously seemed to me a waste of time and so i just started looking for more of a fast track to get into software development so i ended up going to a technical school um that was accelerated but it was totally focused on program um and then of course you know back in the day um the economy when this was happening the economy was very stagnant it was about the time that reagan got elected the first time and i yeah you know i i was a lot of recessions going on yeah yeah i didn't you know i'm not really into that thing but i do know it was very hard to get a job in that time because i had no experience and everybody wants you know five or ten years experience and i'm so happy actually that i couldn't get a job then because i probably would have been working in cobalt in new york city and you know like all the interviews everything was in the financial district you know wall street area yeah and i just i'm so happy i didn't end up doing it because i hated coho in school i i was really attracted to fortran actually and and so you can probably see why well learning the c programming language for me was like an automatic you know it's just like this not not the same as as fortran but kind of like this you know very narrow language and as long as i could remember to put curly braces around control structures rather than just indenting that just indenting didn't work yeah yeah so anyway that's how i got into programming i don't think people realize just how few companies could afford to have programmers as staff right it was uh it was a very um exclusive kind of thing just the you know moore's law and all that um it was not something you could get your hands on right home computers weren't around i guess most listeners probably don't are too young to remember pre-internet days some of them oh i started programming for a living i got actually got paid to program starting in 1983 which wasn't so bad given that i finally finished school i think it was in 82 so it only took me about a year but the way i got the job was a friend of mine worked as like you know the custodian in the building right or this you know that's a nice way to say the other thing but he you know um and he told me about this company that today we would call it a startup back back then it wasn't called a startup it was just this company that was hiring people you know and he told me about them and so i went there and i begged for a job i literally did and and i met with the uh v you know we didn't have ctos and it was like you were the president of a company and then there was a vp of engineering and a director of engineering kind of thing which we kind of have today but anyway both the the vp you know these were all eds guys you know they had been in the armed forces u.s armed forces of some kind so they all had this military background which means they fit into eds really well and they all wore these brooks brothers suits with you know starched white shirts and and so you know i i went in there to interview and they both said to me like we have no idea why we're going to hire you but i think you know we're going to give you a chance and i was like whoa and they seriously underpaid me and you know but i just wanted a job yeah the experience was key and you know that's what it still happens today right people are willing to you know work for um shares and uh a pittance just to get some experience yeah so even that company was uh they were time sharing on boeing computer systems you know the airplane company right used to have timeshare uh and and so my first day at work there was going to a cobalt uh programming you know like and probably you know flow charts and data flow diagrams or whatever kinds of things um and i and so that was in boeing computer services building um in new york city and and uh you know i'm just like no idea what's going on all these experience you know cobol cics you know what is it 3270 terminal and 370 ibm 370 mainframes and tapes and all that i mean i had used all that stuff but it was still just sort of like you know so many mind-blowing things anyway so i so i went through that and then they ended up not immediately using me as a cobalt programmer yay you know like one of the best things that never happened to you and so what i started doing is i started this skunk works thing in um in ibm rom basic right it was free and and um and i would save my programs to a disk and all you had to do you could literally boot that like if you didn't put a diskette in the boot drive of the ibm pc it booted into basic right so so it was this perfect like free programming environment for me and so i implemented this inventory system for uh totally on my own nobody even knew i was doing it until one day right my manager walked in and she's like what are you doing like and this was months in you know because i was doing all my other work you know and everything that i was supposed to do but you know when i got a chance i would start i would code on this inventory system and it really worked i and um anyway it's just too broad a topic to go into why i was even working on an inventory system but it was useful for the job i was doing right so anyway um she sees this and she's like and i and i figured out man i'm gonna get in trouble you know and the next thing i knew she was like we got to get you on the programming team because we you know what had happened is they were not only using ibm three you know 370 mainframes but the the code itself that that was shipped to clients and the reason that i need inventory is because we had this sort of uh turnkey ibm pc system with 10 diskettes that had you know 10 different parts of a cobalt program right ran on the ibm pc with microsoft cobol right and and they were like man this whole thing on the pc is just so messed up because they're putting you know there were these little tabs that you put over the floppy drive indent thingy yeah i remember copyright yeah copy protected or whatever right right yeah yeah so so those things in a human environment would fall off over time and then they'd start using program disks for data disks by accident and and you know and it was like okay yeah so go and like you know insert you know the program pauses says remove disk 2 from drive a and insert disk 5 into drive a and close the door and then hit any key and then the program would keep going so anyway about that time right there was the super ultra famous bite magazine yeah cover c programming language right and i read this article and i was like dude we got to do this you know the the whole thing was about tiny code you know like c was such this minimal language uh and and so you know we had this this whole um uh opportunity what i call it to to rewrite everything and see and again you know it was like this thing i go to the i go to the vp of engineering and i said bill we got to rewrite this whole thing in c and he's like what are you talking about you know like what is c and um so i explained it and i explained how it was gonna you know be you know like we could probably fit the entire program on one disk app yeah and we can even add functionality right and i was correct we we actually took those 10 diskettes and in the end we have had an executable an exe running on uh dos right ibm or microsoft dos and it um i think it was like 100 kilobytes or something you know the whole exe which was just amazing and it had more functionality it was a nicer user interface it was everything was better about it and yeah but you know again they took a chance on me they were like who's you know like this look at how much i look at how much we're paying this kid you know and yeah and and somehow they they allowed me to team up with a few other people and we tried it and and and they and they didn't fire us you know like right away or anything so and then i started building a team yeah as we saw progress we built a team and i i don't even remember how long it was maybe six nine months or something to to the you know actually delivering something and it worked and it was just amazing yeah just a side note for people at um you know before the internet to really learn how to program it wasn't an easy thing you really had to go out of your way because home computers were not a thing so you couldn't type into youtube tutorial on c and learn how to do it and i remember being frustrated with the best programming books always being checked out at the local library and uh really doing trial and error stuff so um you know when people would hand you know lend a hand and they had someone at a computer store that was uh on usenet and all the other things or whatever they as a small kid they would give me a disc oh this kid is interested they'd give me a disc with a disassembler on it or something because i i wanted to learn that and so you know you you were really at the mercy of the kindness of strangers back then to you know take you under the wing and help you out somehow and uh just the infrastructure for learning was not there well being in new york city i had about a you know 45 minute to an hour ride on the subway to get back and forth to my apartment and uh into manhattan right i lived in queens and um they uh um so i got i found this book it was peter norton's you know like inside the ibm pc or something uh something like that i don't i think he actually used basic in that book i can't read maybe it was pascal but it was something enough that i could understand and that's where i actually learned the most about you know like writing to screen memory on the ibm pc if you're on a cga how to prevent flicker you know and all this stuff and you know and how to program the keyboard interrupt 21 versus interrupt yeah 10 maybe was the keyboard i think 16 was the yeah anyway you know and i'm talking hex right so yeah the interrupts were an important part of learning how to properly program right yeah and and it just you know i went from like knowing zero about programming and you know really like useful programming in general to like getting hired as a contractor two years later for i don't know three at least three times the amount that this company was under paying you know yeah and yeah so boom like that right and it was just like from then on i've never even blinked you know it's just like amazing you know all these opportunities and you just keep learning and learning so yeah that's what it was so fast forward to when you got into what we should dare call modern programming where we all learned the pitfalls of some of the higher level patterns of object-oriented programming and how this really started to get into domain-driven design and cqrs and event sourcing and event storming in your case as well so you know where's where does all that um lead up uh actually start to for me it was a pivotal moment in my career there was a there was a hump i had to get over to get into that way of thinking and so um you know maybe uh what where where did that come in uh into your career and what what led up like what's the previous couple of years that led up to that so i did a couple years of contract work and i made really good money uh we were able to buy a house after you know a couple years and contracting which was a pretty huge thing you know i only had like whatever three four years experience and and uh so you know and everything was good it was i was having fun but i just sort of like i've always had this bent on my mother's side of the family um my grandfather was an entrepreneur and and so i you know besides the technical influence on from my my dad's side my grandfather really um gave me that kind of entrepreneurial um spirit in in my head and my heart i guess too and so um i just wanted to start my own company which was i was going to work in cottage industry creating programmers tools for c libraries right like basically see libraries special things and that was a big thing at the time like you made serious money you know doing that and and it wasn't just about the money but it was you know about the freedom and doing what you want to do and like being able to express your ideas so i did that and that was successful and somewhere along the way i started like getting into small talk and there was a point where i actually had the opportunity to work on a very significant you know small talk based application um that ran on ibm pcs but but actually this was using digi talks small talk on os2 and then the cool thing was is that i had actually written a book i was a co-author on an advanced c programmer's guide for microsoft press on os2 well if you know any history about os2 yeah you know that you know like ibm and microsoft were like this except underneath they were always like this and people in you know fighting and stuff but at some point microsoft just said we're we're out you know we're we're breaking our partnership with ibm we are not working further on os2 they can take whatever they want from that we're going with with those right and that was around windows 2. i think windows 3 hadn't quite yeah because os os2 was quite good right and they went with the licensing and the and the compatibility route and windows was just a program running on top of everything right ost really i know it's far far superior yeah than windows beta sony beta versus uh vhs right same kind of thing right yeah exactly and but os2 didn't survive well i had written this book co-authored this book and the breakup happened right as we were finishing the book and so the book never got published the book was for microsoft press you know this to me is one of those other you know sort of like groundbreaking um opportunities where i was gonna be like really set up well by writing this book and it never happened so well it got sold actually strangely enough to addison wesley who is my publisher now and i now have a signature series so well what's that you know so this happened way back there but they never published it because you know um os2 never really got through that adoption point but it was an excellent excellent operating system and presentation manager was way better than windows the api was way better it was a much more powerful system but microsoft whatever they just won you know yeah they took that backwards compatibility route they didn't want to drop anything for for people authoring things they took that uh that route through that saw money and contracts as the number one thing but the innovation certainly was on os two side especially that it was a real operating system not just a program for running on top of dos so anyway that's uh so we were using small talk on os2 um and it was digi talks uh you know small talk vpn right the small talk v was i don't even know what the was it virtual was it very good i don't know whenever the least did for back then but that's what we use so i got experience in small talk and then but you know i had i've used sort of a little bit of small talkish things in c plus before that um the nih the national institutes of health in the u.s had this um c-plus plus library that was supposed to mimic the collections of um you know the small talk collection hierarchy and anyway i i had you know used some of that but you know when i finally got in to see into small talk that is just a mind-blowing experience because first of all you look at the syntax compared to see anything you know you've ever done before like c programming it's totally different and so you're just like you get this headache just trying to read the code until you realize how simple it is right like it's your brain trying to tell you this is way harder than anything i've ever done no it's actually way simpler than anything that you've ever done we get that switch sometimes people getting into functional programming from from uh you know traditional sharp or whatever java yeah so yeah anyway so i so i learned small talk and that was the that was the kind of start of really understanding model view controller and actually uh small talk v um you know digital small talk had what was called i don't know presentation something or whatever so so they actually cut out the controller part right it was just i can't remember the exact name but it was like you went from the view directly to the domain model and you had this little part in i think it was in the view code itself that sort of was like the you know the little translator between the model that the right the controller didn't have to do and well that's what i'm doing today with lingo right it's just it's just trying to reach that ultra simplicity of getting rid of all the layers that you can possibly dispose of right and so anyway um yeah so it's just those things have had a big influence on my life and and my you know my career and i was working with teams at the time where conversation right communication was so important because we were working on brand new core domain kinds of things right that we were doing things that no one had ever done before and and so the conversations literally led to a ubiquitous language that was codified you know into domain models and our user interface it was completely everywhere and and you know we would spend hours and hours trying to figure out how to name something correctly and i would say that the bounded context wasn't there but it was kind of there because we tended to to develop small smaller kinds of tools or applications that would then integrate together and it just it happened but it's not like we had bounded context or it wasn't formalized but you had some organization you had some organization to bite things off in chunks that were manageable not dump things into one giant pot yeah exactly and in small talk we totally used events right that's how the view learned about what happened in the model they were events right so okay like there's not a wire there but there doesn't have to be a wire to use domain events you know so it's it's just you know so when i first read eric's book yeah it was just like this is incredible this is what i was doing all along and what now that i'm not doing this anymore because i'm now out of that environment and and working as a contractor again and just being forced to do all these ridiculous things yeah you can go and do what they ask you to yeah it's like you want to get a job you need to pay bills you know okay you're gonna do ejb now right that's if you weren't doing ejv for probably about three four years you couldn't get a job literally i mean or you could get a job but it was pretty not interesting you know all the startups in the boulder colorado area were using um you know j2ee at the time and there was just no nothing else and i think.net was getting in there but it that was probably three four years after uh j2e and frankly when i heard about the.net effort i had a friend who was really you know i had been very pro microsoft but um but then i heard that they were saying oh no no um all you need is a view and the database right right everything should be a stored procedure and i was like i'm running as far away from that as i possibly can well dot net ended up changing but that's when they mostly just had asp right yeah i think it was asp and microsoft sql server and and and this friend and colleague of mine you know is trying to convince me that this is the way to go and i was like look ejb is stupid but it's not that stupid right i mean there was like there was degrees of stupid happening in the you know late 90s early 2000s but definitely you know that was the ultimate stupid and wow now there's some reasons for that though right i think there's some this this illusion with with kind of the heaviness of the end here like it wasn't just about three tiers anymore she got into these ridiculous abstractions and needless frameworks in between um at some point there's some complications and people said well you can just you know rely on data alone and so the dbas went sure awesome absolutely everything's a third procedure now you have no ide it's all just editing text for a third procedure but it's at the database so it's fast what a great trade-off and i i guess that still continued to work for a while until processors and disks caught up and that that uh that sort of uh scam was over pretty quickly yeah it was just uh it was sort of a unbelievable period of time and then actually spring arrived and i have to say spring was just that it was a really breath of fresh air you know at the time because j2ee really needed to be overthrown you know that was just it was just a ridiculous time and and the thing is they never really after all those failures they just keep kept trying and trying to make ejb work in various ways to the point where yeah you know you're working on now like the weblogic server and you see an exception and what do you see in the exception stack trace spring right spring for they're using spring framework underneath to to create the next you know j-e-e they drop the two right and yeah now it's just j-e-e and you're seeing this stuff and it's like wow they're even using spring and they still can't get it right you know and i guess it was the same kind of effort on the microsoft side right to get um out of the old days of ole and and those kind of dlls and and get into net that that needed to happen as well it was a a real mess if anyone recalls on the microsoft side just a different kind of mess but a mess nevertheless and yeah well and that was a breath of fresh air because it made complex what it was supposed to be right yeah and and all that all that you know at the time i remember like mid 90s i went to this big splash announcement of microsoft you know oh we're just we're taking on the internet and it was activex activex was a big message and i'm still not quite sure that i fully understood that but i think all it was was just calm you know underneath right and they put some yeah something wrapper around it so that it was more web ish yeah those objects wrapped around the the framework plug-ins kind of your base classes for everything you were programming in mfc i guess it was back then mostly and things like that so yeah horrible days i don't really repeat i excluded mfc all every day yeah don't forget to turn off your machine because you're going to waste a lot of energy if you don't right you know it's like those days so yeah i had to i had to boot you know visual studio visual works visual c plus plus is what it was yeah i remember yeah yeah we still have some of those books on the shelf somewhere gathering dust behind you but yeah do we still do we have to keep going through this pain no we can we can we can stop showing how old we are now and we can move into the future and uh and jump into exciting stuff like uh event storming um event sourcing domain german design well we already touched on event uh domain-driven design because uh you touched on eric evans uh seminal book uh on the subject and uh and then so let's take a deep breath and get into the future and present at least and just talk about uh your uh idea behind you know what what stood out most from domain-driven design um and then following on that obviously event sourcing event storming and ckrs and uh organizing solutions in a way that allows businesses to really make the solutions be hand in glove with the business yeah well um i have to say that my first you know officials exposure to event sourcing in cqrs was through greg and udi right so everybody raised that um but again there was familiarity with things that i had done and not cqrs i can't there's i don't think we ever really had that sort of very clear model separation you know it was always using the more you know what i would say traditional domain model where your queries went against that model all right but um but i i saw the beauty of event sourcing and cqrs immediately but to me it just seemed like everybody was bandwagoning at the time right isn't that what's called the the uh what is that in the in the oh the dunning-kruger no no no no no it's the option yeah the the early adopters right they really don't really adopters it was like my other curve is still applicable well yeah well i was the thing is i was um i had enough experience to know when i saw this ground swell around it and i'm really not that conservative but i just said there are going to be a lot of companies who regret letting their people call this shot right and and i don't know like i wouldn't say that the regret happened then but i think we all have seen over the past few years that that there was this sort of trough of disillusionment right that oh yeah and i think that's you're climbing out of that yeah which is important but this is where the dunning-kruger comes in right the people who who say oh we're gonna do event sourcing and we're going to do cqrs or they just say we're going to do cqrs and that means event sourcing right it's just like they don't even know but there was other problems with that adoption because the bandwagon jumping and the new hot uh buzzword it meant that people thought that uh well i don't need to really about worry about data management or security or other things the the silver bullet mentality i think is best described by thinking that it's it's going to do things it's not meant to do as well so it's just all applicable and uh it's not just the hype part that's a simplistic way of looking at it i think people then drag in that all these other things get done magically for you and uh no you still need to worry about your disk space and all those things yeah and udi was not udi was actually not into event sourcing he would um he he was all about cqrs but um and i never really learned exactly how he handled the you know with he used events but he didn't use uh event sourcing that's right but anyway the point is now udi teaches event sourcing right so that's right that's this is interesting to watch over time pioneers versus settlers right you can also call it that yeah and and so i was conservative around those things and i said i openly said i will use event sourcing and cqrs when they make sense right and and i at the time i just didn't have this although you know in reality without the name i was using event sourcing i mean because i was collecting events on medical machines right and and sending those into an aggregate on the on the server side right and we were using spring so there was no jde heavy stuff in there so you know like i was doing all that stuff but i didn't call it event sourcing and i exactly i think greg also talks about that that event sourcing is not new at all it's just it's always been done about record retention immutable storage which is really reliable and gives you key advantages in a lot of in a lot of domains in a lot of areas yeah and the most disappointing thing to me was after collecting all this data you know about medical treatments that are important to people's lives and health they just ended up at some point just throwing it away you know just like dropped the table and or whatever it was and oh we just have too much of this we don't know what to do with it i was like are you serious look at the yeah you know before we had the word big data look at all the analytics you could do with this stuff and yeah they're just like not interested in it you know they i think it was all about you know figuring out how to how to build medicare and medicaid effectively right right you know it was that was their core domain i think that's that's always public versus private uh sectors you're gonna have the abusers of that and people trying to make money off these things which is a sad thing but you know as we learn more we can now fight back with uh responsible design yeah so there we are i mean but but for me personally right um i do i tend to not necessarily attract the people who want to use event sourcing or at least they do now right but initially when i when i was you know a dvd guy now you know officially even though having done a lot of very similar things before that um you know people talk to me about dvd they didn't talk to me about oh we want to do event sourcing and cqrs they talked about greg and udi about those things and everyone that i taught was usually afraid of those things or they would say there's no way our company is gonna you know permit their state to be shotgunned all over the place right it's just how they they viewed it and right so anyway i you know now i talk about event sourcing in cqrs all the time and i teach it and i write books about it and not not just that but i include it you know it's it's an important part of the solution yeah and then communicating these solutions and collaborating on these solutions you obviously dove into event storming with alberto and uh his initial uh blog post about it from 2013 i believe is one of the first time he mentioned it on his blog um what a great way to collaborate together right yeah so i i did this crazy thing the idd tour and i did it because actually some guys in uh belgium okay i went to i went to columbia south america for a couple conferences down there and i taught a couple of workshops down there while i was there and i tweeted about them and then these people in europe started saying come to hungary come to belgium come to poland come to germany come to you know whatever and i was like hmm this seems interesting and and so we put together this thing called the idd tour which was connected with the launch of the red book and right damn it was just amazing to i mean we made prices like really really low right i mean the others were just people inside yeah make it accessible yeah well but i wanted people to learn ddd right i and and i got a lot of criticism about that but now there are conferences about ddp right right so and the people who run those conferences were at my workshops right right so at the very first ones in ibd tour so you know i'm sorry but um i don't apologize for that i actually had an incredibly good idea and i wanted to open up the whole world of software developers to ddd because i think it's important and i think they should learn it and so i did that i just simply did it and we survived you know whatever five weeks of pretty intense stuff and you know buildings in europe that didn't have air conditioning and you know and learning you know like getting taken by the the hotels that we you know like like people are going to say like oh you can go to poland and you can have the least expensive little mini conference or workshop you know big workshop mini conference there yeah poland kroc off right it was like the i mean we got so overcharged for that it was just incredible like we we hardly made enough money oh i'm so sorry that's my that's my hometown i apologize no it's not it's not your fault it's just like i don't know we were i don't know we were trying to treat people well i mean we had like this four course meal in the hotel there every day for lunch and yeah i don't know if we paid for their breakfast too or whatever but anyway the point was um that was my thing i wanted people to learn dvd right yeah of course you got to make money and yeah but we really didn't like i made that whole year of starting with that i made far far less training with you know in dvd than i ever did as a consultant right oh of course yeah so it was just this was a labor of love it always is people don't realize that they think high-flying uh conference goers are these millionaires it's like no i can i cannot test for greg and others as well yeah yeah so anyway um and that's how the whole my whole ddd thing started i i you know that my first book gets published finally after i'd written the book 20 years or more before right and and now my first actual published book arrives and um and the idv tour and then we were like then you know nicole and i spoke and she was like you know we can't keep doing this we actually have to find a way to make money at this and otherwise we can't do it and so that was you know that so yeah i mean we have virtual things now so it's a little bit easier but uh i certainly you know i did i did a small little tour so i know you're um your travel pains but definitely not five weeks i haven't done a five week one yet that should be fun i should do it it was fun i mean the thing is right i invited alberto to join me in belgium uh i think alberto if you took all the european companies at least or countries from that time forward i think he's probably more popular in belgium than he is in italy i i have no doubt people loved alberto right and when he and when he demonstrated for the very first time in public event storming in my tour workshop yeah in irvine belgium yeah people's mind they were just like whoa this is so cool and so that you know we know what happened from there yeah plus is uh super charismatic and incredibly talented as well as a talented artist uh yes that's why he the the you know drawing uh pictures and all that and you know something that i love about him is that he has this creative side to him which i think is so important in engineering that people overlook and so has been yeah and of course being personable just helps run those types of collaborative workshops and run and be able to lead them so definitely changed uh how we do those things in person with one another for sure so from event storming when you started to do event uh storming you started to look at this gluing i guess the business side with a technical side making sure people are talking about the same using the same language ubiquitous language and they're starting to be able to collaborate together and not work as some as the way that it used to at least in my perspective throwing things over a wall and waiting until the smart guys on the other side would give you something back to that how does uh how does that lead into v lingo and everything that you're doing today uh that last well um lingo by the way we've we've made a decision we don't our messaging isn't out there yet but just for what it's worth vlingo is now the company name zoom xom is the name of the product right so the platform so we're separating those two things because actually we have other products that we're working on um but um yeah so zoom as a platform as an ecosystem came about because actually you know i had learned about the actor model before my book even was was published right i was very interested in it and i started working on an actor model for java and i was just playing around and and um experimenting and stuff and i don't think i actually ever put the java uh stuff out on open source but what happened is i i um the you know the book and the tour and all this stuff just you know preempted that work and it was like okay you know i have to tell you first of all you know when you spend time writing a book and if you write books at the pace that i write books um that's because you're either working all night long or you're working all day long and all night long right yeah which means you don't make money so i know the feeling right so i you know i had a a point in time there that i had some pretty dry more than a year but not two years right and and so because i'm putting all this energy into this stuff and uh it was sort of like okay you know on the family side of things and even the business side of things like okay vaughn it's time to go you know like you did this now now go out there and you got to make some money for the family right so so that's when i just said okay i talked to nicole and she's she's like well why don't you drop the actor model thing and here's this akka thing that you've looked into and maybe just jump into that and see if they can you know be amiable to the whole ddd thing and when i first talked to jonas you know he was like no we don't have any efforts around dvd but we should look into it kind of thing that was i don't even remember when it was probably 2011 2012 somewhere like that and i just uh so you know i took nicole's advice and i said okay let me try this out well i think i had some influence there but not the level that i wanted to and without going into a lot of details my disappointment just led me to say okay now i have time to do this the way i know it should be done and this is why lingo and now zoom the new name exists right so you know maybe people still want to use those other tools and stuff whatever i'm just doing a completely different thing right and it is reactive it is message driven it is event driven and whatever but we're doing something different in that you do not have to like totally throw away everything that you've learned in java or c-sharp over the years and just say like okay now i got to turn my brain upside down to do this new stuff no no actually you get you get a whole lot of mileage out of what you learn and and right think about those old small talk days where i said they got rid of the controller right in in digital small talk i got rid of the controller well it's there but literally the only code literally that you have to write is your domain model because we have auto dispatch from rest right you want to call it an endpoint whatever we call it you know resource handlers but because actually that's what we're exchanging right as resources so why not use the names right ddd naming right so use the names it's a resource okay represent state transfer okay and and and so they're resources and so we we have auto dispatchers from rest requests to the domain model and automatic responses based on the domain model outcome right that that one command that you're using and also if you receive events or commands or whatever through messaging any kind of message that you receive through a topic exchange whatever you want to call it from a messaging mechanism we auto dispatch those to the domain model so now like don't bother me with all those extraneous architectural things that everybody wants to do those things but frankly when you do them once twice i'm telling you by the third time it's just like why do i have to keep doing that that's exactly right and it's and it's like so complex to track down where things go wrong and yeah just just like get that stuff out of the way exactly let the platforms or the ecosystem take care of that part of the architecture for you and focus on the business stuff yeah make great domain models right or at least good donate models yeah but what i'm not sure if you share this point of view but i think it's uh i at least found that when you're talking about quote-unquote new concepts like event sourcing or or cqrs or domain-driven design and all of these things people think they're going to have to learn to program from scratch almost and they don't realize that they're still going to be typing the same type of code you're still going to have to put html on that web page you're still going to have to write to it some sort of a data store 80 of it is still the same all you're doing here is getting a hand in organizing it so you know things like zoom and vlingo as long as they have this ability to gently lift away all those boring parts without really changing the way that you talk about your domain language etc and really start to you know influence your business well that's pretty bad then you're good right i don't know if you share that um at least that's my learnings that's what it's all about but i do have to say you're going to have to get used to not writing getters and setters yes okay we can agree on that if you're doing java just please get used to not using getters and setters and i i just tweeted about you know spring has this world famous pet clinic thing out there and it's just to me it's like i would be embarrassed to put that as my sort of like flagship example i have to say it's just horrible it's a horrible example and so i sat down with one of our developers the other day and we talked about you know just very briefly how could we turn this into an actual domain model you know and and we did and it took like an hour to do that and i i drew it up he's now working on the the code right for for actually implementing the pet clinic but yeah just go look at that and that that is quintessential what you do not want to do right that that is like just don't do that yeah i mean what's funny is they have this thing called a model but it's not the model at all it's abstract base types right that are used by the things that are actually model but they're not in the model they are in the endpoints right it's just like no no please stop spreading those messages because unfortunately they have the power to influence millions of developers how to do it wrong i know yeah and it's just so sad to me and i know they hate me but i don't care it gives me more strength because i know i'm doing the right thing you know yeah you're saving people from a lot of pain down the road all right there's a lot of these yeah this stuff that sounds so good on the surface and has these uh i call it demo aware right where people see something exciting at a conference and the excited cto comes back to the company everyone stop what you're doing we're doing this now yeah i've been promised great you know great rewards using this new tool so yeah it's um it's really interesting quick question about vlingo and zoom any any kind of inspiration for the names um well you know it's weird i was trying to come up with a name but i knew i knew that the name had to have lingo in it because of ubiquitous language right lingo i just and it's a fun word even though we may not think of the ubiquitous language as being lingo because it's really not lingo but it but it is a word that me that refers to language right yeah a set of language and it's a fun word because it has an i and it has an o right yeah sound sounds like italian or spanish or something and all those words are fun yeah um and then i threw v in front of it because i couldn't think of another thing honestly it's just the initial for my name so it's not it could be virtual too right it's not really an egotistical thing it was literally just i kept searching and searching searching for a name and then um and then and i just couldn't come up with something but then i just said oh what about v in front of lingo and the dot io was available so i i just jumped on it like that and i just said i got to move on right yeah this part of the naming thing shouldn't be that important right then someone pointed out later it was like or actually i i learned later i don't know why the you know google didn't show me that there was actually a company named vlingo before that got acquired so the name is no longer used oh good but there was a company that got acquired it totally unrelated to you know yeah everything i'm doing but um i discover that later but anyway i have the same problem but it's yeah i think it's well yeah i would have heard it i am old enough to remember adapttech they they were backups yeah that's right that's right that's right yeah there was a tech but there is there was a more current one as well um but yes the original one people still ask me is is that that company adam no it's not man you should be retired by that yeah what happened yeah uh bad acquisition anyway so uh we have about three minutes left is there you know i tried to look for some i think we really touched on everything that people were talking about i was glancing at um at the chat as we're as we were talking but i think we covered all of those things um anything you'd like to leave on in terms of uh where people can find out what's going on with zoom the next steps i know that there's a net version that's out now that's so now it's full javaful.net um anything else you'd like to say about you know where people can learn about it um obviously you can find people can find you on twitter very easily i'm sure and anything to do with domain driven design i'm sure you pop up in the top three links uh in in google um but anything else you'd like to kind of leave people with to you know what are the next steps to get a hold of you get your training um try out um zoom as it's now properly called and uh and look for other the other products you're working on at vlango well we've had sort of this unexpected identity crisis especially with vlingo because people have told us they're like what does this thing actually do you know like we like okay it sounds interesting it looks like you've got all these parts but what does it do and let's see a demo yeah and that well no but i mean what does it do in terms of explaining to them what it does in one sentence or a few sentences so that's what we're working on right now is improving our messaging improving our messaging as in you know like product messaging yeah to explain what it is and explain what it is and and so that's going to get straightened out but you know i think what we've said now is actually consider um potentially zoom is a low code um solution because actually right i mean we we literally can generate this entire bounded context project for you um and and most of all the you know um architectural decisions are already handled for you doesn't mean you can't change the code or whatever it's just that you start off way ahead of where you would otherwise and then but then you really just need to focus on the domain model so from that standpoint it's low code it's not low code and that we take over and you can't do anything that you really want to do and this is only for corporate developers who don't really know how to program you know of mentality that's not what it is at all um but yeah just go to vlingo.io we have really inexpensive developer support available right now i will tell you that's not going to last again it's just yeah it's just fun not making money right this is just this is just how i go about starting to do things as i i first do them because i want to and i want to help people and then later we have to try to figure out how we're going to make money you know so it's literally pennies a day right that's nice it's a dollar rate yes so it's a hundred things like that really yeah yeah so that's that's that's really great and what is your next event that your people can see you at is there a conference or another set of workshops that you're going to be starting well i am speaking at some conferences in europe you know virtually uh this spring and i think jax jack's uh what is it called jax enter jax one of those jacks conferences is upcoming and i think i don't remember even honestly i i'm doing too many things and and some sometimes things are just a blur but uh yeah there are if you go to iddworkshop.com you can see all the workshops that i'm doing is it okay if i talk about you for a minute oh sure absolutely yeah so actually yeah adam's going to do his um uh um event modeling workshop a two-day workshop i think in may is it right yeah yeah they're filling out the details and uh catching up on that but it's should be listed soon right yeah and uh we have some others that i just probably shouldn't announce yet but you're going to be really happy to see this kind of training because it's just it's like things that you always wanted to learn about but you either can't find a workshop for it or the people who teach the workshops are really not good at teaching those workshops and this person is just incredibly good at teaching the workshops and i wish i could say her name right now but just to be nice oh okay i think i know who it is okay i'm not gonna spoil it though no no take a guess julie lerman no ah julie that would be great too yeah uh thinking of ddd and we're i'll tell you what i i won't tell you her name but her initials are susanna kaiser yeah yes right and she's really good at teaching well probably everything that she teaches but i know that she's really good at teaching this certain subject and i'll just name her right now that she's in and there are others but again that those are those are a little ways off so we've got some really good stuff uh upcoming whether you attend mine or someone else's no that's great so okay well thank you so much i know you have limited time and we only had an hour this time but i think i think it was really important to catch up and give the full story of who von is what he's doing and what he's been fighting for for everyone uh to have a better time when they go to their day jobs and they are working with uh with a nice environment where everyone knows what they're doing and they're collaborating and so i thank you from the bottom of my heart for taking the time um it's really nice to get all the background and just have you know for once have you speak more than others and you know we all need can learn from you and so it was my great pleasure to give you the uh the time and uh and space to talk about everything you wanted to and i hope i covered all the subjects but door is always open for more and uh i hope to do that soon thank you adam and thanks for being so uh inviting and open and it's great to finally get to meet you kind of personally but you know we'll we'll actually have beers someday but i believe yeah our our paths seem to have crossed very near each other but never actually in person so i'm glad that finally happened and look forward to the future collaboration so thank you same on this side i'm very grateful for everything you've done uh in the past and uh i'm looking forward to everything you're doing now to come to fruition and all the plans you have for the future so i hope people follow you and uh and take a look at what you're doing at every step because there's lots to learn and lots of awesome stuff to to use and help your organization thank you again vaughn it's a true pleasure again thank you

Channel: The Event Driven Podcast

Views: 272

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: PCgbeb8qPys

Length: 72min 0sec (4320 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021