Seeing the System: Using EventStorming to Understand, Challenge, and Redesign Software

Whether you’re working with legacy systems, planning new features, or reviewing a team’s proposed data model, EventStorming is a powerful tool for surfacing what really matters in your architecture. In this session, you’ll learn how EventStorming has helped teams uncover the real scope of a project, reconstruct the logic behind legacy features, facilitate stakeholder conversations, and challenge questionable architectural assumptions.

We’ll walk through practical patterns and real examples: how to run effective sessions, what kinds of conversations to look for, and how to use EventStorming to bring clarity to both technical and business perspectives.

If you’re an architect or senior developer looking for ways to cut through complexity and design with confidence, this talk is for you.

We use EventStorming with clients and get an assortment of outcomes:
- Discovering features in legacy apps
- Identifying future enhancements to understand the direction of an app
- Discussing architectural considerations and unearthing why certain choices may not make sense in their circumstance

Snack Time: EventStorming with Snack-Inspired Systems

Ever wondered how a vending machine really works? This 4-hour workshop dives into Event Storming and how it can improve your system design and coding experiences, using a vending machine as our case study. We’ll uncover hidden bottlenecks, streamline workflows, and build a clearer understanding of any system - from snack machines to software. Through engaging, hands-on Event Storming exercises, participants will collaboratively map out every step, revealing opportunities for improvement and building a more ‘constructible’ solution. It's about getting to the heart of the matter, just like understanding how a vending machine delivers your favorite treat. Join us for an interactive session on how EventStorming can be used for exploratory conversations as well as for designing better systems with better requirements and a shared understanding.

On Mentoring Junior Developers

While it is one thing to learn from videos or blog posts, it is a different experience when you have someone to turn to that can answer the questions you have when you have them. It makes a world of difference to be able to ask someone “What do they mean when they say ‘inheritance vs. interfaces’?” When you have someone who forces you to think about what it is you want in life and what steps you may need to take to get there… someone who can make introductions and offer direction… it makes your career and life a little less scary and a lot more manageable. In this session, we will look at some practices that are used by great mentors in the field and learn lessons on how we can be great role models and mentors for our future – junior developers!

From Monolith Towards Microservices: EventStorming as Your Modernization Blueprint

Modernizing legacy monoliths is a daunting task, but EventStorming offers a clear path forward. Join us as we show how you can use EventStorming to deconstruct your monolithic .NET applications and migrate them towards a microservices architecture. This session will provide actionable insights into the EventStorming process, highlighting how it helps align technical and business teams while reducing risks and ensuring a smooth transition.

Decision Records: Understanding Why Those Decisions Were Made!

Ever stared at a complex system and thought, "Wait, why was that decision made?!” We’ve all been there – lost in a maze of logic, struggling to track down the root cause of a problem. Decision Records offer a brilliant way to finally unlock that understanding. They’re like having a detailed, searchable log of every decision in your applications – from architectural style to authentication to service discovery and containerization. By capturing these decisions, you build more maintainable, auditable, and, frankly, less frustrating systems. In this session, you will learn how decision records solve problems and will be given ideas of templates that you can implement in your projects today! Let’s ditch the guesswork and start documenting the why – because truly understanding your systems is the key to unlocking its full potential!

Keeping Your Developer and Architect Skills Sharp: A Modern Guide for Continuous Technical Growth

Staying sharp as a developer or architect isn’t about chasing every new framework — it’s about building a sustainable, intentional practice that keeps your skills fresh, relevant, and resilient. In this session, we’ll explore a modern, practical approach to continuous technical growth, blending hands‑on coding practice, architectural thinking, and real‑world application.

You’ll learn how to use code katas, architecture katas, personal projects, and modern learning platforms to strengthen both your coding fundamentals and your system‑design intuition. We’ll look at how deliberate practice (yes, including “shipping more pots”) accelerates improvement, how to apply your skills through open‑source contributions, hackathons, and community events, and how sharing what you learn reinforces mastery.

Whether you’re a developer leveling up or an architect staying ahead of the curve, you’ll leave with a clear, actionable strategy for keeping your skills sharp — and a set of modern techniques you can start using immediately.

Beyond the Prompt: Ethical UX Patterns and Cloud Architectures for Responsible AI

When AI fails, it’s rarely just a bad prompt - it’s usually a fundamental system flaw. AI systems that hallucinate, make biased assumptions, or burn massive compute resources on simple tasks don't just create technical headaches; they erode user trust, alienate diverse audiences, and waste energy.

How do we build AI applications that protect human dignity, respect cultural nuances, and stay resource-efficient?

As developers and software architects, we can’t treat ethics as an afterthought or leave it solely to policy documents. It has to live in our software design, our UI components, and our cloud pipelines.

In this session, we’ll look at responsible AI through a practical system design lens:

- Why should we care? How underlying system choices directly impact user autonomy, inclusion, and backend compute bloat.

- How do we implement it? Practical UX and architectural patterns - like progressive disclosure, confidence scoring, model right-sizing (SLMs vs. LLMs), and semantic caching - that keep systems lean and human-centered.

- What specific tools can help? How to leverage native responsible AI and carbon-tracking tools built directly into Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud Platform.

Whether you're writing code, designing interfaces, or mapping out system architectures, you’ll leave with concrete strategies to audit your tech stack and build AI systems that honor both people and the planet.