Platforms and Organisms: Systems that Evolve

This DDD Vienna meetup has two sessions, with a pizza break in between. First, Christian Folie shares the story of his team's work. They used Domain-Driven Design to transform several separate products into one shared business platform. Then Anke Wagner leads an interactive workshop on emergent systems. She compares patterns in biochemistry to patterns in software architecture and shows how Bounded Contexts can work like self-organizing cells.

Timeline
🚪 17:00 Open doors
🎬 17:30 Official start
🗣️ Session 1 - Talk by Chris: From Products to Suite: Establishing a Business Platform
🍕 Break with Pizza and Networking
👭 Session 2 - Hands-on Session by Anke: Designing for the Unpredictable: A Workshop on Emergent Systems

Session 1 - Talk by Chris: From Products to Suite: Establishing a Business Platform
You start by building a product for a specific market segment and its users. The focus is simple: build what is necessary to make the product successful. Reuse is not a priority.
Then new ideas emerge. Your boss has plans for a second and a third product, each targeting different market segments and different users.
Now a question appears: should these products be merged from the start, or should they remain fully autonomous?
In this talk, I will share the journey of how several autonomous products, initially built without shared capabilities, gradually evolved into a suite of products. Along the way we established a business platform that exposes capabilities our applications can build upon.
I’ll walk through how we identified business and technical capabilities in our existing products, and how we began thinking more strategically about our product landscape. A key influence was Jabe Bloom’s idea of the “Three Economies”, which helped guide how we approached building the platform.
The result is a platform that allows us to run experiments quickly and evaluate new business ideas in the market.
If you’re interested in a real-world story of applying Domain-Driven Design ideas in greenfield product development, this talk shares what worked for us. And what we learned along the way.

Session 2 - Hands-on Session by Anke: Designing for the Unpredictable: A Workshop on Emergent Systems
We’ve all seen it: the "emergent behavior" in our production environments that no one planned for, and no one knows how to fix. But what if we could harness emergence as a design pattern rather than a bug?
In this interactive session, we step away from the slides and move to a guided discourse. We will explore the fascinating parallels between physical chemistry and biochemistry—where complex life emerges from simple chemical interactions—and software architecture.
We will dive into:
👉 The Science of Emergence: How local rules create global patterns.
👉 Domain-Driven Design: Using Bounded Contexts to create “cells” of logic that interact organically.
👉 Systems Thinking: Discussing how feedback loops, positive or negative, can impact software systems leading to desirable outcomes or cascading failures.
Come prepared to discuss, debate, and draw. We will collect real-world experiences from the room to determine how we can move from rigid blueprints to fluid, adaptive architectures.
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🗣️ About our speakers

Christian Folie: Software Developer & Mountain Enthusiast
https://www.linkedin.com/in/christian-folie-b57639252/
Christian works at Salzburg AG as a Developer, Architect, and Consultant and has been trying to understand and apply Domain Driven Design since 2010. He helps to discover domains, coaches teams in implementing solutions with DDD & Event Sourcing, and builds products. In Salzburg, Christian regularly hosts Coding Dojos and facilitates the Global Day of Code Retreat. In his free time, he can be seen in the mountains using either his feet (and a big wooden hiking stick), a mountain bike, a road cycling bike, or on skis touring up the mountain.

Anke Wagner: Software Engineer, Tech Lead, Software Architect
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anke-wagner-72959487/
Some of the most fascinating systems on Earth have no central controller.
Cells organize themselves. Molecules assemble themselves. Ecosystems evolve without a master architect.
Our host today has spent her career studying exactly these kinds of phenomena—not only in biology, physics, and chemistry, but also in modern software systems.
Anke Wagner began her journey as a biochemist and researcher in molecular science and biophysics, investigating complex emergent processes at the molecular level. She later translated those insights into a second career as a software engineer, architect, and technical leader, where she now designs large-scale distributed systems and drives software transformation initiatives.
What makes Anke's perspective particularly unique is her ability to connect scientific principles, systems thinking, Domain-Driven Design, and practical engineering experience. As an educator, mentor, facilitator, and architect, she is passionate about helping teams discover new ways of thinking about complexity, resilience, and organizational design.
Today she invites us to look beyond traditional architecture diagrams and explore how the laws governing natural systems can inspire better software systems.

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Thanks to andamp for hosting us and sponsoring the event.

andamp is a software development company working with clients in the public sector, finance, and energy. They take an AI-first approach to building enterprise systems with teams based in Vienna and Warsaw.

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🎤 Call for Speakers & Sponsors!
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