Rebecca’s Web – Design and Reality

This collection contains works I’ve co-authored with Mathias Verraes. In 2017 I met Mathias at the ExploreDDD conference. After listening to my keynote, Curating Your Design Heuristics, Mathias was inspired to get serious about capturing, recording, and organizing Domain-Driven Design heuristics. He suggested that we get together and talk about some of his heuristics. But…there were sessions going on and presentations. He remarked, “Yes, but they will be recorded, you can listen to them after the conference.” So, instead of attending afternoon sessions, we talked.

Mathias shared heuristics for designing well-formed events. We teased out nuanced heuristics about precision and amount of information passed along in an event payload. We talked about subtle differences that the seemingly “identical" events can have, based on timing and who initiated them. At the end of our conversation, Mathias crumpled up the big sheet of paper he’d been drawing on…he didn’t need it to remember all these heuristics—after all, he taught a several days’ course that covered these things. That evening I diligently wrote up notes of our discussion and shared them with Mathias. I wish we’d kept that piece of paper; it would’ve been interesting to see how our design ideas have evolved.

That was the beginning of many conversations on modeling and design with Mathias and many hours writing together. A few topics we’ve polished and subsequently they've made it to the light of day via our respective blogs. We’ve gathered several essays into the book, Design and Reality.

Design and Reality

Splitting a Domain Across Multiple Bounded Contexts

Design and Reality

Models and Metaphors

Critically Engaging With Models

Surfacing Worldviews in Design

Critical Software Redesign: Creating the Environment for Large Scale Change