Lovin' Legacy - The Systems We Don’t See (and ones you've never heard of)

Apr 30, 2023

Avoiding Legacy? DDD, Collaborative Architecture and Product Thinking with Nico Krijnen

Do you hate legacy or do you love it? Do you accept it or do you want to stamp it out? This time I talk to Nico Krijnen (Lumunis) about the opportunities we have in our legacy codebases to understand our business better, the strategic use of new technologies to make important product improvements, the importance of collaboration and visualisation to create a shared vision of software architecture and our product no matter what state the codebase or architecture. We discuss the meaning of legacy, what it is and when it appears, how to fix it, how to avoid it and how to prosper as a business while replacing it. We also talk about what you can do in your pipelines to avoid legacy automatically, the importance of visualisation, context mapping in DDD and C4 diagrams. In a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion, we talk about what it takes to make great software in the age of microservices. NOTES The DDD NL meetup: https://www.meetup.com/domain-driven-design-nederland/ Nico's workshops at DDD Europe: Full-day workshop on June 6: https://dddeurope.academy/applied-eventstorming/ 2h hands-on at the main conference: https://2023.dddeurope.com/program/playing-with-domain-models-in-code/ Automating architecture validation for Java and .NET: https://www.archunit.org/ https://archunitnet.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ With an example of using it for a layered or onion architecture from one of Nico's workshops: https://github.com/nkrijnen/workshop-apeldoorn-jug-2022-11/blob/main/part-01/src/test/kotlin/eu/luminis/workshop/smallsteps/ArchitectureTest.kt Nico's speaker profile & linkedin: https://sessionize.com/nico-krijnen/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicokrijnen/ And an overview of some of the courses Nico gives through Luminis: https://www.luminis.eu/expert/nico-krijnen/ QUOTES [01:41] "it seems that in our industry, only seniors and architects, et cetera, are getting in touch with domain-driven design at some point and I think that's a waste" [NK] [02:10] "so one of the things I really wanted to do is trying to lower that learning curve [for DDD]" [NK] [04:03] "you need to have ways to create sort of a shared mental model of the stuff you're working on" [NK] [05:02] "We had a chat the other night about, how we feel about Legacy. I said, I love it and you said, I hate it. How does the legacy fit into to your daily work?" [RB] [06:20] "legacy can have a lot of bit different meanings, but typically it means something that's not, at least how I see it, is it's a code base or a product that's not easy to work with anymore." [NK] [06:38] " I like to go fast. I like to, to build stuff and, and be excited about those things and not feel dragged down by, a big stone that you're dragging along." [NK] [06:47] "that's why I hate it [..] but to be...

33 min