dave buchanan

VP of Engineering

@dave_r_buchanan

It all started with summer school and a Texas Instruments computer in 1984! Since then Dave has 20+ professional years experience in web development, architecture, management, and mentoring others. His expertise is in integrating new technologies, leveraging open source for the enterprise, and team building. Dave has presented in the past at Explore DDD 2019 and 2018, MadisionPHP 2016, OpenWest 2016, MinneBar 2016, and WordCampMSP in 2014 and 2013.

Talk Session

Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Pragmatic DDD to separate two businesses from a single system

When Getwork broke off from their parent company, we were faced with the challenge of untangling a ten-year-old codebase and migrating to AWS. Complicating matters, the old software was not documented, and the core software team was no longer available.

To overcome these challenges, we turned to Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles and used virtual event storming to document the business process and determine contextual boundaries. With this information, we modeled each event and built a new microservice for each different part of the business, creating a separate microservice for each business process. We also migrated from onprem to Aws/Kubernetes, while maintaining business continuity.

In this session, we will share Getwork's experiences with using pragmatic DDD to separate two companies' tech platforms. We will provide a case study of our journey, discussing the challenges we faced and the solutions we used. We will focus on practical, real-world examples of how DDD can be used to untangle complex systems and maintain business continuity during significant changes.

Topics covered will include:

• Using event storming to document business processes and determine contextual boundaries
• Modeling events and building microservices to replace legacy systems
• Strategies for migrating to new technology stacks while maintaining business continuity
• Maintaining flexibility and agility in systems undergoing significant change
• Lessons learned and best practices for separating technology platforms using DDD

Attendees will learn how DDD can be used to solve real-world problems and how it can help to create flexible, agile systems that can adapt to change. We will also provide practical tips and insights for using DDD in similar scenarios.