#41: DDD Greece goes North vol. 2 - Message design patterns and tradeoffs in EDA

Hello team,

For our next event, DDD Greece goes North, again! The next week's tech highlight is the Voxxed Days Thessaloniki conference, taking place on 7-8 of November. Since the tech community will be there, and many of our members are attending, we decided to run the next version of our meetup for the second time in Thessaloniki!

Talk: Message design patterns and trade-offs in EDA

- "Our domain code is clean, but we can't trace message flows in production and debug issues."
- "Our event structure helps observability but the domain concepts are buried in boilerplate code that handles metadata."
- "Other teams keep subscribing to our internal messages or are constantly asking for changes to our public message schemas."

Sound familiar?

When designing distributed systems, we often make quick decisions on the structure of the messages we publish and consume, without really evaluating critical trade-offs between domain purity and operational requirements that can impact us in the long run. The same can happen with schema versioning and evolution, broker topology and separation of internal vs public events.

This session explores the practical implications of such decisions through real-world examples and lessons learned the hard way.

We'll examine how different approaches to structuring messages and broker topologies affect not just the code but also the team's ability to reason about, evolve, and operate the system. We'll pay special attention to the differences between internal and public-facing events, and how these considerations change across different message brokers and cloud-native messaging solutions. Rather than prescribing a single "correct" answer, we'll provide a framework for making informed decisions in a given context.

This talk is for practitioners who've tasted the complexity of event-driven systems and need practical insights and pragmatic approaches to balance competing concerns when designing systems.

Speakers

Kostas Stroggylos is a principal software engineer, currently fighting legacy and architecting novel software solutions at Kaizen Gaming. When not getting his hands dirty with code, he studies the sociotechnical aspects of complex systems. He is passionate about organizational agility and fast flow. He serves as a volunteer and committee member for Devoxx Greece, an organizer for Better Ways (ex Agile Summit) and co-organizes Domain Driven Design Greece.

Sponsors

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PRODYNA
Holistic customer experiences based on strong technologies - PRODYNA offers strategy, design, development and operation for digital transformation.

Venue

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OK!Thess stands as the forefront of Thessaloniki's thriving startup community, serving as a driving force for the expansion of the regional innovation ecosystem.