Breaking the Habit - Rethinking how we build understandable software

We're excited to kick off a new chapter for our DDD community.

This is the first event in a new series exploring the broader ecosystem around Domain-Driven Design (DDD). DDD will always be at the heart of our community, but we're opening the door to related ideas that challenge, enrich, and expand the way we think about software, teams, and complex systems.

And we couldn't think of a better topic to start with.

Much of how we build software is shaped by mental models and habits we've developed to make complexity feel controllable. We plan. We create processes. We optimize delivery. We introduce new practices when the old ones stop working. But complexity keeps finding its way back in...

What if the problem isn't that we haven't found the right process yet but that we're still trying to control something that needs to be discovered?

In this session, Tamás Pallagi and Attila Bertók will take us on a somewhat unconventional journey through some of the assumptions and habits that have shaped the way we build software.

Along the way, we'll explore questions like:

When does planning quietly turn into prediction and control?

When does performance become an illusion of progress?

How do processes become habits and habits become culture?

What changes when we stop trying to specify everything upfront and start learning through participation?

And what does any of this have to do with Domain-Driven Design?

We’ll explore software development and organizational thinking, along with a few ideas that might make you question things you’ve been doing for years, all with a bit of music.

This is an invitation to examine some of our old assumptions, ask better questions, and perhaps break a few habits.

Who is this session for?

Anyone who enjoys thinking about software beyond frameworks, languages, and design patterns.

The discussion will likely resonate especially with software architects, senior engineers, tech leads, and engineering managers, but anyone curious about how teams navigate complexity are very welcome too.

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Venue

The evening is kindly hosted by ABBYY at their Budapest office:

Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út 12, 5th floor

1051 Budapest, Hungary