Notes from the Austin DDD Book Club

We had our first meeting of the Austin DDD (Domain-Driven Design) Book Club today, and I thought it went well for a first meeting.  The book club was created because a few of us noticed at the Austin altnetconf that a discussion on DDD brought many widely different views on the subject.  To gain a deeper insight on DDD, some Austinites decided to get together every other week to read and discuss topics in Eric Evans’ Domain-Driven Design book.

This week, our group tackled:

• Part I Intro
  • Chapter 1: Crunching Knowledge
    • Chapter 2: Communication and the Use of Language</ul> Here’s a nice photo of a discussion in progress:

    

    As you can see, we had about 10 folks join us (Kevin is out of frame on the right).  No chairs were thrown either, which was good for all parties involved (including the chairs).

    The discussions tended to meander from the book some, which is fine, but it usually means you don’t get to finish all of the material, which we didn’t.  We did have some good discussions on:

    • Definition of “Model”
    • Whole team
    • Importance of communication
    • Ubiquitous Language
    • Modeling strategies
    • Many war stories of not doing whole team, or having bad communication, or having excessive translation between technical and business folks

    I’m sure there are some other topics I’m forgetting.  Since some conversations went way off-topic of DDD and into XP, I think I might try harder next meeting to keep it focused on the material, as it’s the only way we’ll get through it.  I noticed a couple of times people thumbing forward, which indicates they’re ready for the conversation to either move on or get back on topic of the book.

    In any case, it was a nice meeting, and hopefully there was enough interesting discussion for everyone to come back next meeting.