On Wednesday, the day before Ascension Day, we hosted our recurring event dedicated to enhancing our knowledge and exploring new concepts and technologies. This year, we commenced with a morning workshop on event storming, followed by an engaging session in the afternoon delving into the rapidly evolving realm of AI-powered software development tools.
Event storming; que?
Event storming is an awesome workshop format that helps us understand complex business processes and systems. It’s all about bringing together different people like domain experts, developers, and product owners to explore and visualize events, actions, and outcomes. With event storming, we get a shared understanding, find hidden dependencies, and come up with cool solutions for software development and beyond. It’s a fun and creative way to tackle challenges and spark innovation!
Under the guidance of our partner, AxonIQ, our instructors taught us about Event Storming and how we can benefit from it in our work as software engineers. AxonIQ brought along Steven, Gerard, and Mitchell as our trainers.
Why we asked AxonIQ to help?
AxonIQ is a highly regarded organization recognized for their creation of the Axon Framework, a robust tool designed for developing scalable and resilient applications based on the principles of Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and Command-Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS). With a strong emphasis on event-driven architecture, AxonIQ empowers developers to construct efficient systems that capture, store, and process business events effectively.
Within the context of AxonIQ, Event Storming holds significant importance. It is a collaborative technique that aligns seamlessly with their philosophy of embracing domain events and modeling complex business processes. Through interactive workshops and visual representation of event flow, Event Storming enables AxonIQ to gain invaluable insights into intricate domains, identify relevant boundaries, and architect solutions utilizing the Axon Framework. By fostering a comprehensive understanding of the problem domain, pinpointing crucial events, and shaping the architecture of event-driven systems, AxonIQ effectively delivers innovative, scalable, and event-centric solutions to their clients and the broader software engineering community.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it…
The assignment given to us was to devise the operational processes for a bike rental service. To facilitate the process, the workshop leaders divided us into two groups and provided business requirements as guiding points. We took it upon ourselves to organize and identified our domain experts—individuals who were not only adept at quickly comprehending the business requirements but also skilled at improvisation.
Initially appearing as a daunting task, it transformed into a captivating and imaginative session where active participation and valuable contributions were made by everyone involved.
After we’ve been storming the events (facts happened in the past) we added processes (blue stickies) to support the events. Slowly we came up with suprising new offerings and meanwhile had a lot of fun.
We concluded the initial segment of the day by presenting our findings to one another. This lighthearted exchange prompted amusing remarks and a friendly sense of competition between the teams, even though no prizes were awarded.
Lunch, the second most important meal of the day
After a lively discussion and sharing our experiences, we took a break for lunch, which we savored under the warm sun. Good food, fantastic colleagues, and delightful weather; what more could we ask for?
hackathon: breaking the paradox
The second part of the day consisted of a hackathon, during which the group divided into three multi-disciplinary teams. Their mission? Develop a production-grade, cloud-based (web) application for the bike-rental process(es) within a timeframe of 3.5 hours. The objective was not simply to work harder, but to work smarter. The teams were encouraged to leverage new tools and services that incorporate AI and Large Language Models, aiming to minimize manual work as much as possible.
After 3.5 hours, the teams presented their outcomes to one another.
to summarize…
With three captivating presentations from the diverse teams, we further fueled our energetic discussions on the sun-drenched terrace, accompanied by refreshing cold beverages. Laughter echoed through the air as we reveled in moments of joy and camaraderie. Not only did we have an absolute blast, but we also gleaned invaluable knowledge, learning from both our triumphs and our mistakes. These enlightening experiences provided us with fresh perspectives and valuable insights, enriching our collective understanding.
