Halil İbrahim Kalkan
Co-Founder at Volosoft
Istanbul, Turkey
Actions
I am a software architect and developer. I love to work on open source projects, producing articles, videos and giving talks on software development.
I'm the lead developer of the ABP framework (see https://github.com/abpframework/abp and https://abp.io/)
I'm mostly interested in developing reusable frameworks & libraries, distributed systems, multi-threaded and scalable solutions. I'm talking at local and international conferences about multi-tenancy, microservice architecture, domain-driven design, modular systems and developer tools.
Visit my website to see a list of my previous talks: https://halilibrahimkalkan.com
Links
Area of Expertise
Topics
Building a Kubernetes Integrated Local Microservice Development Environment for ASP.NET Core
Microservice architecture is a quite common approach to build highly scalable solutions with a large development team. While there are standard tools, like Kubernetes, to deploy, run and scale your microservices, the development side is not as mature as that. It is not easy to develop, run and test a single microservice that depends on other microservices and services. Running a copy of the entire system in the developer's machine is impractical.
In this talk, I will introduce an efficient way of creating an ASP.NET Core development environment that is well integrated to Kubernetes. In this way, you can just run and debug the microservice you are building in your local machine and let Kubernetes run all other services and dependencies in your local machine or a remote server.
Designing Monolith First for Microservice Architecture
Starting a new project with a monolith might sound old-fashioned, but it’s often the smartest path toward a scalable microservice architecture. When service boundaries are unclear, jumping directly into microservices can create unnecessary complexity, duplicated effort, and painful rework. A modular monolith, on the other hand, gives you the flexibility to refine domain boundaries while keeping development simple and cost-effective.
In this talk, I will share a practical approach to designing and implementing a monolith that is intentionally structured for future transformation into microservices. You’ll learn how to define clean module boundaries, how to keep coupling under control, and which design decisions today will save you major effort tomorrow. Attendees will walk away with a clear mental model and concrete patterns for building modular applications that start small but are prepared to scale into distributed systems when the time is right.
Dynamic Entities in .NET: Building Low-Code Systems on Top of Entity Framework Core
Designing a truly dynamic data model is one of the most challenging tasks in modern application development. Many teams fall back to traditional approaches like Entity-Attribute-Value (EAV) or overly generic schemas, only to struggle later with complexity, performance bottlenecks, and maintainability issues. In this talk, we will explore the landscape of dynamic entity systems, compare alternative patterns, and highlight their strengths and tradeoffs, before zooming in on how Entity Framework Core can be leveraged to build something both flexible and efficient.
Drawing on real-world experience from building the low-code capabilities in ABP Framework, I will share the key architectural decisions, pitfalls, and solutions that made our dynamic entity system robust and performant. You’ll see how EF Core’s extensibility can be pushed to its limits, how to handle querying and schema evolution at runtime, and how to avoid common traps while maintaining developer productivity. By the end of this session, you will have practical insights and patterns you can apply in your own projects when facing the challenge of designing dynamic yet reliable data models.
Tying Local Development and Kubernetes: A Smarter Way to Build Microservices
Microservices are the go-to architecture for building scalable systems with large teams. While Kubernetes has become the standard platform for deploying and running microservices, the development experience still lags behind. Running an entire distributed system on a developer’s laptop is often slow, impractical, and painful.
In this talk, I’ll show an advanced, yet practical way to create a developer-friendly environment fully integrated with Kubernetes. With this approach, you can run and debug your microservice locally, while letting Kubernetes manage all the other services (whether on your machine or a remote cluster) and seamlessly bridge these two worlds together.
Open Source in the Enterprise: Lessons Learned from Building a Global .NET Framework
Open source projects often begin as passion-driven side hustles, but only a few manage to grow into products that power enterprises worldwide. This talk tells the story of how the ABP Framework started as a small GitHub project and transformed into a full-fledged company with a global developer community. You’ll hear about the turning points, the hard decisions, and the strategies that made this journey possible.
From building a sustainable business model to scaling a distributed team and managing hundreds of releases, the session will share the practical lessons behind running a successful open-source framework in the .NET ecosystem. If you’re interested in how open source can thrive in the enterprise world, or considering taking your own project to the next level, you’ll leave with concrete insights, cautionary tales, and inspiration for the road ahead.
Domain-Driven Design in a Modular Monolith: Patterns That Scale
Applying Domain-Driven Design (DDD) in real-world systems is challenging, especially when it comes to balancing complexity, scalability, and maintainability. While many teams jump straight to microservices, a modular monolith often provides a simpler, more practical foundation. In this talk, we’ll explore how modular monolith architecture can embody the principles of DDD (bounded contexts, aggregates, domain events) without the operational overhead of distributed systems.
Through real examples, I’ll share proven patterns for defining clear module boundaries, handling cross-module communication, and keeping domain models isolated yet cohesive. We’ll also discuss when and how a modular monolith can naturally evolve into microservices, ensuring that the architecture scales with both the system and the team. Whether you’re building greenfield applications or modernizing legacy systems, you’ll leave with concrete strategies for applying DDD in a way that is both pragmatic and future-ready.
Resilient Workflows for Cloud-Native Applications with Dapr
Managing workflows in modern distributed applications is often one of the toughest challenges. Long-running processes, error handling, retries, and coordination across multiple services usually require complex custom code and fragile infrastructures. Dapr Workflow addresses these challenges by extending Dapr’s building block approach into workflow scenarios, offering developers a simpler and more reliable way to orchestrate their services.
In this session, we will explore the fundamentals of Dapr Workflow and see how it can be applied to real-world scenarios. Through live demos, we will cover managing long-running tasks, implementing the saga pattern, and designing resilient workflows for cloud-native applications. By the end, you will have a clear understanding of how to build scalable and fault-tolerant workflows that can be easily integrated into your applications using Dapr.
Designing SaaS Architectures: Multi-Tenancy Patterns in .NET
Multi-tenancy is at the heart of every SaaS product, but choosing the right model is rarely straightforward. Should you use a single shared database, a schema-per-tenant, or a database-per-tenant approach? And how do you balance cost, complexity, compliance, and scalability as your application grows? In this session, we’ll explore the architectural patterns for multi-tenancy in .NET applications, highlighting when each approach makes sense—and when it doesn’t.
Going beyond the basics, we’ll dive into real-world SaaS challenges: onboarding new tenants, handling custom features, managing thousands of tenant databases, and dealing with “noisy neighbors.” You’ll learn the trade-offs behind different models, operational pitfalls to avoid, and practical lessons on evolving your architecture as your product matures. Whether you’re starting a SaaS project or scaling one, this talk will equip you with the knowledge to make multi-tenancy a strength rather than a bottleneck.
Implementing Domain Driven Design as a Pragmatic Developer
Domain-Driven Design is one of the well-accepted approaches to building a large system with a maintainable codebase. It offers strategic and tactical patterns for software development. This talk focuses on tactical patterns with a pragmatic approach and explains how to layer your software, how to practically implement aggregates, repositories, domain services, application services and other fundamental building blocks with real-world examples and well-defined rules.
The solution structure and code samples are based on .NET and C#. However, the talk is useful for developers and architects working with any server side technology.
Using the ABP Framework as an Opinionated .NET Application Architecture
The open source ABP Framework fills the gap between the plain ASP.NET Core and the enterprise application development requirements. It provides infrastructure for every layer of a software solution and offers a maintainable and extensible architecture to build modern software systems. It is actively used by tens of thousands of .NET developers.
In this talk, I will introduce the problems of modern software development and show how ABP Framework provides solutions to these problems and makes us focus on our own business logic instead of spending our time on common requirements and repeating ourselves. The session will include live coding, demos and explaining the concepts and discussing alternative approaches.
Halil İbrahim Kalkan
Co-Founder at Volosoft
Istanbul, Turkey
Links
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top