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Episode 539: Adam Dymitruk on Event Modeling
Adam Dymitruk, CEO and founder of Adaptech Group, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of the event modeling approach to discovering requirements and designing software systems. Adam explains how the structured approach eliminates the specifics of implementation details and technology decisions, enabling clearer communication for all stakeholders while keeping conversations focused on the business opportunity. Using concrete examples of event modeling in practice, they examine event modeling in the context of other related approaches and methodologies, including event sourcing, event storming, CQRS, and domain-driven design.
Adam Dymitruk, CEO and founder of Adaptech Group, joins host Jeff Doolittle for an exploration of the event modeling approach to discovering requirements and designing software systems. Adam explains how the structured approach eliminates the specifics of implementation details and technology decisions, enabling clearer communication for all stakeholders while keeping conversations focused on the business opportunity. Using concrete examples of event modeling in practice, they examine event modeling in the context of other related approaches and methodologies, including event sourcing, event storming, CQRS, and domain-driven design.
Show Notes
From the Show
From IEEE Computer Society
From SE Radio
- Episode 249 – Vaughn Vernon on Reactive Programming with the Actor Model
- Episode 447 – Michael Perry on Immutable Architecture
- Episode 470 – L. Peter Deutsch on the Fallacies of Distributed Computing
- Episode 520 – John Ousterhout on A Philosophy of Software Design
Transcript
Transcript brought to you by IEEE Software magazine.
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Jeff Doolittle 00:00:16 Welcome to Software Engineering Radio. I’m your host, Jeff Doolittle. I’m excited to invite Adam Dymitruk as our guest on the show today for an exploration of Event Modeling as an approach to requirements gathering and system design. Adam has over three decades’ experience in information systems, software development and architecture, along with Open Source platforms, open standards, and digital sovereignty. In the last 15 years, he’s focused on ledger based and event driven architectures. He is the author and inventor of Event Modeling. The approach is revolutionizing how information systems are described. Adam is also a core contributor to event sourcing and CQRS theory and practice since 2008. This included introducing PAPQS to the approach and helping with the Microsoft Patterns and Practices CQS journey book. He is one of the top 1% contributors on Stack Overflow for version control, including holding one of the three gold badges on the subject. Over the last seven years, he has built a successful consultancy specializing in authoring event driven systems. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Dymitruk 00:01:19 Thanks Jeff. Glad to be here.
Jeff Doolittle 00:01:21 People in the software industry have been gathering requirements and designing systems for decades now. So where does the need for a different approach arise?
Adam Dymitruk 00:01:30 Oh, well it arose for me by trying to do a lot, as in my introduction you said, I had my own company to start and as any startup knows, funds are hard to come by and I just noticed the overhead of specifying software was quite high. So, the magic moment happened when I noticed if we think about systems from the events perspective, then we are able to do more with less. And so out of that realization spun out a new format that was lighter weight and still gave all the benefits of all of the other practices such as user stories, et cetera, that you may have going all the way through as we’ll cover in the episode down to project management, maintenance, et cetera.
Jeff Doolittle 00:02:17 So Event Modeling sounds like in this history of kind of an eventing approach as a relatively more recent development. You’ve been doing it for a while of course, but it’s probably new to some of our listeners as well. But how does it kind of relate when we think about the history of information systems, like how we got started with collecting and defining information and then how does it kind of fit in that flow?
Adam Dymitruk 00:02:36 Right. So good point. The information systems are nothing new to humanity. We’ve had information systems for thousands of years long before computers. And so I often talk about this mismatch that we go through as we start using computers in the very limited form that they allowed us shortly after vacuum tubes and when transistors and integrated circuits happened. I think in my mind anyway, I wasn’t born yet, but when I look at the type of work that was described and the systems and how they worked and how they’re described, really focused on this incredible jump in productivity, the transistor gave us an incredible boost to the processing speed. And we talk about Moore’s Law all the time about how ships are getting faster. So that was a real shot in the arm for information systems to have everything digitized. And unfortunately, we didn’t have the same shot in the arm for storage.
Adam Dymitruk 00:03:31 And so we lost this ledger way of thinking about information systems because up to that point it was really record keeping that allowed information systems to scale and to be organized, to find out why things aren’t going right, et cetera. So the system of account was almost like information systems were accounting systems for information instead of money. This problem, I mean this, it’s not a problem, but this real great advantage of being able to process data really quickly showed a disadvantage of having a really expensive storage. And I always use the example of the 10-megabyte IBM hard drive that cost a million dollars back in 1954-56, I forget the exact, there’s a very famous photo you can look up online if you just look up IBM hard drives in the fifties. And I think the thing took $30,000 per month to run and it was the size of a small room.
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