Building Bruges

Autonomy is the promise of Domain-Driven Design — yet at scale, many organizations end up trading centralized control for fragmented chaos. At the same time, Enterprise Architecture is often dismissed as too slow, too abstract, or fundamentally incompatible with empowered teams.

This talk argues that both views are incomplete — and both break down at scale. Drawing from multiple large-scale transformations, we explore how the useful parts of Enterprise Architecture — when combined with DDD principles — can enable true autonomous landscapes: systems where teams move independently, boundaries remain explicit, and governance scales without re-centralization.

Brent fell in love with code when he was twelve. Looking back, young him didn’t know many things about programming, and there were many struggles to wade through during the first years of his professional career. A year or two ago he got confronted with what felt like yet another new reality: the rise of AI, and especially his struggles with it.

It’s time for another Building Bruges hands-on workshop! In this workshop, we’ll be working on an (extremely small and limited and totally fictional) racing league manager app.

The project is in maintenance mode, so it doesn’t need a lot of attention, right? Incorrect! We’ll do some refactoring and add some new features and well, we’ll see where that brings us 🙂

Afterwards, we’ll discuss our experiences and enjoy a drink.

Practical

The meetup starts at 20:00 in building A of Howest (there will be signs inside). There is parking underneath the building, but the elevator and stairs in the parking will be closed. You need to enter the building by the main entrance at the front.

Every programmer deals with software architecture. Every day. All the time. Some knowingly, some unaware. Not one single architecture, but a mixture of different ones, different styles, different patterns. Like ingredients in a meal.

In this talk we take you to a journey departing from the gang-of-4-train-station, passing through interesting places like hexagonal-city, REST-ville, the kingdom-of-events, the metropolis-of-commands-and-queries and of course… the holy-land-of-microservices. At each place we eat the local dishes, we taste the spices, look at what makes each place unique but also how they are similar.

10 years ago we had the idea to organise a conference in Gent to bridge the gap between developers and the people runing their code. It was the start of a new global movement. We never predicted that #devops would be where #devops is today. The word devops has evolved, the community has evolved.

Docker has solved all of our problems, the ones left behind were solved by Kubernetes. Everybody and their neighbour is Scrum certified now and we are all happily sipping cocktails on the beach. Or not? Why after almost 10 years of pushing culture change, teaching about Infrastructure as Code, teaching about Monitoring and Metrics … and helping people to share both their pain and their learnings are most organisations still struggling with software delivery?

In deze presentatie deel ik mijn inzichten over de ‘modular monolith’ architectuur en hoe deze een flexibele en schaalbare basis biedt voor moderne applicaties. Ik bespreek hoe je nieuwe applicaties kunt bouwen met deze architectuur, hoe je bestaande systemen kunt omvormen, en ik vergelijk de voor- en nadelen met microservices. Aan de hand van een real-world voorbeeld laat ik zien hoe ik de modular monolith heb toegepast in een project om zowel de ontwikkelsnelheid als de schaalbaarheid te verbeteren, zonder de complexiteit van volledige microservices.

In today’s data-driven world, Azure developers are increasingly required to collaborate with data engineers, analysts, and scientists to build robust and efficient data solutions. Having no data affinity whatsoever, I wanted to break out of my comfort zone and explore this data thing. However, things got pretty confusing, pretty soon.
Should I focus on data warehouses, lakes, swamps, or lakehouses? Is ELT a typo? Should I learn Greek first to be able to understand these delta, kappa, and lambda architectures? And what should I do to get a bronze, silver, or gold data medal?
This session will be packed with information that I wish I had when starting my data journey. You will get practical guidance on how to implement your data solutions using Azure PaaS and Data components.
By the end of this session, you will be able to engage in meaningful discussions with other data professionals without feeling like an imposter.
So expand your horizons, boost your knowledge, and let this session be your first step towards a data mesh nirvana!

The world of automated tests can be quite overwhelming. Tests exist in a wide variety of flavours; like unit tests, integration tests, API tests, database tests, acceptance tests, UI tests, performance tests, regression tests, smoke tests, etc. … All of these have their usefulness for the specific purpose that they are serving. When zooming in further on unit tests specifically, we find that there are generally two different types of verification: state verification and behaviour verification. How and, most importantly, when should we apply these types of verification? Then there are also two different approaches to TDD. Which of these should we choose? There’s a lot to learn about a seemingly simple practice as Test-Driven Development. In this talk we’re going to discover why it’s important to find a balance in TDD and how to accomplish this.

The use of simulations for industrial applications has greatly increased in the recent years. These digital twins are widely used: from testing software on yet-to-be-built machines to experimenting with the layout of new production lines.

In this talk, simulation engineer Lienert Deprez explains what a simulation can do and how game engines are excellent tools for developing them. The talk delves into how a game engine functions and the differences compared to ‘conventional’ software development.

OpenTelemetry is a rapidly growing standard for distributed tracing, logging, and metrics and is quickly achieving its purpose of becoming an industry-wide embraced standard. The early adoption within the .NET ecosystem, has made it a breeze to use in your applications. But larger, more complex systems, introduce challenges that require us to strengthen our understanding of observability and the capabilities of the OpenTelemetry specification.

However, there are more complex scenarios to consider when investing in the visibility of larger distributed systems. To do so, we need to understand how to choose the right observability signal for the right job, when and how to propagate information, and consider the right criteria when selecting a sampling strategy. In this session, you’ll learn the right questions to ask, and gain a deeper understanding of the available options in the observability space to become more effective in spying on your systems!