Matt Wynne

This was my first time at Explore DDD, I finally made it here after years of aspiring to.

Since moving to Turtle Island in January 2021, I have struggled a bit to find my tribe, work-wise. I felt very much at home earlier this year at Agile Open Northwest and this felt very similar. People exploring the intersection of software architecture, extreme programming and AI, all in a human-centric way.

I met up with some old friends, and made a bunch of new ones.

It’s one of those wonderful conferences where speakers attend each other’s sessions, very much a level playing field with a huge amount of cross-pollination of ideas. Lots of workshops, and a good sprinkling of really thought-provoking talks. I got to see Jessitron deliver her latest iteration of this talk live. Elizabeth and I ran our workshop on “non-authoritarian team practices” and none other than Woody Zuill showed up!

Thanks to Rebecca, the conference included a hands-on “Design Storm” where the whole conference self-organized into teams and were introduced to two domain experts from Denver Water. This was an opportunity to practice our techniques together, learn from each other, and solve an actual problem for a mission-led organization. The presentations this afternoon were just awesome, and I could see the folks from Denver Water were blown away.

But the highlight for me was probably the open space, which blossomed on this final day of the conference, with a bunch of us staying in the room, after the conference had closed, right up until we got kicked out of the room!

From left-to right:

• Steven Diamante, who co-hosted the workshop on building your own coding agent with me.
• Paul Rayner, founder and organizer of the conference.
• Marco Emrich, who has build a fascinating framework for evaluating different agentic coding setups, especially their performance at TDD.
• Chris Lucian, of the Mob Mentality podcast.
• Ted Young, of the JitterTed YouTube channel.
• Lada Kesseler, who was showing us her TDD Skill as we took this photo
• Mike Clement, who facilitated the open space

Some of my take-aways, off the cuff

People still care about getting agents to do TDD. There’s a lot of research going on here about how we might get agents to follow a really fine-grained TDD process. We had some deep discussions about the value of TDD (keeping the cost of change flat) and how most popular skills that claim to get agents to do TDD really don’t. We talked about the trade-offs with longer wall-time and token spend compared to one-shotting. I’m curious to see how these techniques might work with dumber, faster models.

Paul runs a great conference. I’ve known Paul for years, and he is a great facilitator. The vibe of the conference was super professional and a polished experience yet also very down-to-earth and collaborative. We finished the event with a big retro where we all left feedback for the organizers on sticky notes. I think everyone felt like a participant not just an attendee.

DDD is more relevant than ever. As LLMs get increasingly sophisticated at writing code, these timeless patterns for integrating human knowledge and decision-making into software, and making strategic decisions about the architecture are fundamental. With people like Matt Pocock and Gergely Orosz talking about this stuff, we’re starting to reach a mainstream audience.

Visual modelling is the future. This is a group of people that love to use visual models to represent ideas. We played with a bunch of home-rolled tools people have been building. I’m excited to see some of these folks at ComoCamp next year and dig deeper into these topics!

The red queen effect. Chris Lucian used expression this to refer to this feeling of having to run to stand still: that we’re now working perhaps harder than ever despite being more productive than ever. Something Jessitron also talked about. It was a running theme of the conference and a lasting puzzle for me.

Coding past each other? In this moment we’re experiencing a Cambrian explosion of software, with people able to easily turn their ideas into reality. Yet with this vast increase in the amount of stuff being produced, it’s impossible to keep track of what even your friends are doing, yet alone integrate it into your own thinking. The exploration is great, but I worry about the waste of good ideas going unheard. Events like this are a really valuable way to pick up on those ideas and get them noodling around in your brain.

Thanks to everyone who made this event happen, I’ve had a wonderful week here in Denver.