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

Richard Bown: 00:00:00

Hello and welcome to Loving Legacy.

Richard Bown: 00:00:02

I'm your host, Richard Bown, and this time I'm joined by Nico Krijnen.

Richard Bown: 00:00:06

Is that right?

Richard Bown: 00:00:07

I said it right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:07

Yeah, that's totally right.

Richard Bown: 00:00:09

Thank you.

Richard Bown: 00:00:10

Um, good to meet you.

Richard Bown: 00:00:11

Good, good to meet you again.

Richard Bown: 00:00:12

Maybe you could introduce yourself to everybody and, um,

Richard Bown: 00:00:16

then we can discuss our topic.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:17

Yeah, that's fine.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:18

Um, so I'm Nico and I've been working in the software industry for a while.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:23

I've been doing a lot of product development, let's say development as

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:26

part of a product for quite some years.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:28

Had a nice experience of going from absolutely, uh, nothing to

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:33

a good working product with a lot of, , people using it worldwide.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:36

That was really cool.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:37

Journey.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:38

Also being in somewhat bigger companies in, uh, what they

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:41

call the servant leadership role.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:42

But I really also have a deep technical understanding.

Richard Bown: 00:00:45

Your background, is development though, would you say?

Richard Bown: 00:00:48

on the,

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:48

uh, developer.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:49

. So my view is always very broad cuz I want a complete successful

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:53

software solution on the whole.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:55

So, um, I need to know a lot, a lot of stuff on a lot of different topics.

Nico Krijnen: 00:00:59

Uh, but the field's just too huge.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:01

You can't know everything.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:02

So, uh, but still I'm surprised sometimes how much I know on specific stuff anyway.

Richard Bown: 00:01:08

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:01:08

And you work for company called Luminis, is that right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:12

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:12

It's, uh, consultancy in, uh, Holland called Luminis.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:15

And then Luminus as a whole is a bit bigger, so you also have a lot

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:17

of other colleagues who are pretty much all of them very smart people.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:21

So, uh, there's a lot of people around you that you can, uh, lean

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:24

on and I think that's really nice.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:26

Uh, combination.

Richard Bown: 00:01:27

and we met first, uh, end of last year, I

Richard Bown: 00:01:30

think November, December time.

Richard Bown: 00:01:31

There was a domain-driven design, uh, workshop.

Richard Bown: 00:01:34

So you, you organized the meetups as well, you, for DDD nl.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:39

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:39

I knew about the meter for a while and I was always interested in DDD, because

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:43

I think there's a lot of value in it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:45

, it's somehow it seems that in our industry, only seniors and

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:49

architects, et cetera, our level are, are getting in touch with, uh,

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:53

domain-driven design at some point.

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:55

And I think that's a waste because there's a lot of value in there that also, uh,

Nico Krijnen: 00:01:59

juniors, et cetera, could benefit from.

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:02

They just didn't encounter the problems yet that, uh, that you need DDD to solve.

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:07

That is useful for pretty much everything you do.

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:10

so one of the things I really wanted to do is trying to lower that learning curve.

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:14

. The workshops really to help people experience firsthand what kind of

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:17

things you can do to take small steps.

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:19

Making that big change and to force yourself into a mindset, into a way

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:23

of working that helps you do that.

Richard Bown: 00:02:26

No, I love, I loved it.

Richard Bown: 00:02:27

I really enjoyed the workshop.

Richard Bown: 00:02:28

I went along again this week and again, I really appreciated the effort that was put

Richard Bown: 00:02:31

in there because it was, as you said, and you, he mentioned something that you just.

Richard Bown: 00:02:35

Said as well, like about how a lot of the time, the terminology or

Richard Bown: 00:02:38

the, yeah, don't mention dDD I think is, was part of its closing words.

Richard Bown: 00:02:41

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:02:42

Because it does tend to put people off because there seems

Richard Bown: 00:02:45

to be this kind of idea that the learning curve is quite steep.

Richard Bown: 00:02:48

So we might come across it as a software engineer day to

Richard Bown: 00:02:51

day and overcome it somehow.

Richard Bown: 00:02:53

But when you see it written down, you go, oh yeah, maybe that's a

Richard Bown: 00:02:54

big problem that I'll come into.

Richard Bown: 00:02:56

Where can I fit this, fit this into my way of working?

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:59

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:02:59

Whereas probably you already, you've already experienced this a bunch of time.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:02

But yeah, if you don't know all the terminology, then you don't recognize it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:05

And then some of the ways stuff is described stays very abstract.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:10

So then I make it very concrete by just letting people experience it in code.

Richard Bown: 00:03:14

So yeah, you mentioned visualization there as well.

Richard Bown: 00:03:16

We, through event storming and we talked about the other night

Richard Bown: 00:03:19

things about example mapping.

Richard Bown: 00:03:20

Um, and we did some domain modeling or pieces, pieces of these,

Richard Bown: 00:03:24

um, These are aren't activities that you do by yourselves.

Richard Bown: 00:03:27

They're really all about collaboration, aren't they?

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:30

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:30

Because, uh, in the end, software is getting more and

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:33

more complex these days, right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:34

And the time.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:36

That, and I'm sure you, you were in that time as well, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:39

Where we could just write pieces of software all by,

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:41

yourself, and it would be fine.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:43

That time is long gone.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:44

Right now we're building, uh, distributed systems with, uh, multiple people, with

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:49

multiple teams working on pieces where the cognitive load of all the technology that

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:53

we talked earlier, earlier about, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:55

It's too much for one person or even one team to handle.

Nico Krijnen: 00:03:59

Uh, so you need a lot of collaboration to get stuff done, and it also

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:02

means that you need to have ways to create sort of a shared mental

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:07

model of the stuff you're working on.

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:10

Um, not just on technology, uh, but also with like domain experts, people who know

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:16

how uh, the problem that you're solving could be solved or what the problems

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:20

are that you may wanna, uh, solve or how something works in that domain.

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:25

Getting all the knowledge together, is a big challenge, because in the end,

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:29

right, a lot of engineers talk a different language than people who work in a certain

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:34

domain . So, DDD provides a lot of good ways to write the concept of a ubiquitous

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:39

language, of bringing that together.

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:42

And, uh, event storming is one of the, I think, very approachable ways to do that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:46

But there's many, many more collaborative ways of doing that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:49

I think it's really good to, uh, to put more and more focus on that and

Nico Krijnen: 00:04:53

just create more and more tools to allow us to do that, uh, in a good way.

Richard Bown: 00:04:57

No, absolutely.

Richard Bown: 00:04:58

Um, okay, so this podcast is about Legacy and about Loving Legacy, and

Richard Bown: 00:05:02

we had a chat the other night about.

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:04

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:05:04

we feel about Legacy.

Richard Bown: 00:05:06

Because you asked me, you said to me, so yeah, what's the name of it?

Richard Bown: 00:05:08

Oh, legacy and I, I said, cause I love it.

Richard Bown: 00:05:10

And you said, oh, I hate it.

Richard Bown: 00:05:11

That was your response.

Richard Bown: 00:05:12

So yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:05:14

So how do you see that?

Richard Bown: 00:05:14

So what's the, yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:05:15

How does the legacy fit into to your daily work?

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:17

I mean, the best times I've had writing software was always

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:20

when you're just write, when you're thinking of new stuff, when you're

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:22

writing new stuff, , somehow that feels the most productive and especially when

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:27

doing it with, A team of people, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:29

With different skill sets.

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:30

So you combine these skill sets and you create, you get this sort of

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:33

magic where you can create stuff that you could never do yourself.

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:36

So I think that's, that's, uh, really nice to be in such a situation.

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:41

And when you get into a situation where there's a system with a lot of

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:44

history and started it somewhere, and then, obviously still, uh,

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:48

being involved in it, uh, later on.

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:51

Um, but a lot of people joined that project throughout the

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:54

time, and obviously it's not.

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:56

At the start, it's your baby, sort of, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:05:58

And uh, and you have total control over everything.

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:01

And you can put your vision, your ideas in there, and then a bunch of , years later,

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:05

your vision changes, your ideas change.

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:07

So you have to bring that along.

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:09

You have to be very disciplined and very structured to make sure that it

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:13

stays in a, sort of, in a good shape, but at some point, , if you don't

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:17

do that, it becomes legacy, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:19

And, uh, legacy can have a lot of bit different meanings, but typically it means

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:23

something that's not, at least how I see it, is it's a code base or a product

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:27

that's not easy to work with anymore.

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:28

You don't like being in it, you don't, uh, feel like it's, uh, you are getting

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:34

stuff done at, at the pace that you would like to get stuff done, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:38

I like to go fast.

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:39

I like to, to build stuff and, and be excited about those things and

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:43

not feel dragged down by, a big stone that you're dragging along.

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:47

So, , that's why I hate it, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:51

, And that's really why I don't want to be in the situation.

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:53

But to be honest, all our industry is full of it, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:06:56

Because there's so many places where we are trying to go faster and faster

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:00

and agile and faster, faster, and I think the big problem is that a lot of

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:03

teams do not have the discipline to then go fast, but also go quality, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:10

And you have to have.

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:11

Both of those because the moment you let slip of quality and that control and

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:16

architecture and all those kind of things, , you end up in legacy very quickly.

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:21

So even if your, your idea is, ah, let's just rewrite because this, this stone

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:26

is so heavy, we can't lift it anymore.

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:28

Let's just, uh, start from scratch.

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:30

It sounds very appealing, but in a lot of cases, If you don't do

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:33

something about your mindset and the way you're doing that, you're just

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:36

gonna end up with another stone and you're dragging around two stones.

Richard Bown: 00:07:39

Okay, so a couple of things there.

Richard Bown: 00:07:41

First of all, you said the quality is, is important.

Richard Bown: 00:07:44

So I was gonna ask about your approach.

Richard Bown: 00:07:45

So typically when you meet a legacy system, first of all, what, what

Richard Bown: 00:07:50

are the smells of its legacy?

Richard Bown: 00:07:51

And secondly, what would you start to think about doing

Richard Bown: 00:07:54

to improve that situation?

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:56

Yeah, it depends very much on the situation, but, let's say last

Nico Krijnen: 00:07:58

year I was in a a place where, uh, a clear smell that I've picked up, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:03

Because I just jump in the project and I, I look around and to be

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:08

honest, I wasn't there to fix the legacy but I smell things right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:11

And then, uh, one of the things I smell, it's okay.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:13

This, this team is using a branching strategy that's way too complicated

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:19

for what they're trying to do.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:20

There were two developers and they were having working on

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:23

three releases at the same time.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:24

That's just, totally crazy.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:26

Uh, and it was a, there was also a lot of meetings and stuff around it, right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:29

To organize what goes into which release and then never to re branch and re

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:33

well, lots of, lots of wasted work.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:35

So then I go in and I say, okay guys, let's not do this.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:39

Let's change the way we do that, do things.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:41

Let's just move gradually Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:44

Towards a more trunk based way of working.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:45

Cuz it's just.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:46

Two developers there, even if we're gonna add more later, let's try and get there.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:51

But we need stuff to make that happen.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:52

So one of the things they really needed is to get, there was sort of a

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:55

manual testing cycle that took a week.

Nico Krijnen: 00:08:58

Uh, so, uh, we got someone in and they started working on a, uh, test automation

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:02

suite, which took a half a year Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:04

To get that in place.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:05

But at that point they had a, uh, let's say fully automated regression

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:09

test, so deploys to production could be done, let's say after that ran,

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:14

which was, uh, Well, half an hour.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:17

So that's different from a week, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:19

So you, you, you change the ball game completely.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:22

at that point you get to into a very different, flow of working and

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:25

things start to go fast again, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:28

So it's the way you work.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:30

So it's a branch strategy, but it was also, the way the pipelines were set up,

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:34

it was also the way the testing was done.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:36

Cuz there was good unit testing, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:38

But this.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:38

It wasn't enough to give confidence that the thing is actually gonna work.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:42

Cause they were having issues with stuff going or breaking every time.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:46

. Also because of the complexity of the branch strategy, not knowing what

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:49

you're actually putting into production

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:51

so there's just one example, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:52

But there's just so many, many others.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:53

I mean, I remember that, um, in another early project we

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:57

had to replace Elasticsearch.

Nico Krijnen: 00:09:58

And we were, still using a very old version of that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:02

Uh, just, uh, didn't get, uh, get around to upgrading it because

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:04

somehow it wasn't important as all the features we're building, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:08

Because we couldn't upgrade our spring libraries anymore because the spring

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:12

data library we use for less search couldn't be upgraded cause it couldn't

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:16

talk to the old version anymore.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:17

So you sort of get this cascade of things that are holding you back.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:21

We couldn't upgrade the Java version because of that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:23

There's just so many things stacking on top of each other.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:26

So we just knew, okay, this, we have to tackle that thing, but

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:30

it was gonna be a big change.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:32

Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:32

It's not an easy upgrade.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:34

But we just did it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:35

We all, again, took half a year to do that, but we kept the whole

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:39

system working all the time.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:41

We had zero downtime deployments all throughout.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:44

We did deployments twice a week pretty much.

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:47

, so we did that whole migration, but in such a way that we could essentially

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:51

get the whole new variant up and running and, and ready and test it, et cetera

Nico Krijnen: 00:10:56

before we do the actual migration of our production, uh, environment.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:00

Uh, and it also meant that, because a big problem with these kind of

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:03

big changes is that while you're working on the big change, which

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:06

is gonna take half a year, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:08

Somewhere halfway, there's gonna be a super high priority business thing that

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:12

comes by and it means you have to go back and work on the, the actual features.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:16

Cause it's a system that's making money, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:19

This legacy system is the place where, where you, where your business runs on.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:23

So.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:24

You have to, to do stuff on it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:26

Right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:26

Keep it relevant to your customers.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:28

To be honest.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:29

We did the migration within, uh, the complete migration we did in 10 minutes.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:33

But we just prepared the whole thing in such a way that we could do that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:36

And that works.

Richard Bown: 00:11:38

Wow.

Richard Bown: 00:11:38

Okay.

Richard Bown: 00:11:39

Well, the, the two examples you gave a lot of your work is actually handling.

Richard Bown: 00:11:42

Legacy in some way, in some form.

Richard Bown: 00:11:44

Either improving it, um, or improving a process around it, or having to

Richard Bown: 00:11:49

build something which, which has got a legacy component already.

Richard Bown: 00:11:52

So not like that in that last example.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:55

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:55

So, and I still hate, hate working with legacy, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:11:58

But, refuse, uh, I refuse to accept it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:01

I think that's more than mindset, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:02

So I, I refuse to accept it as legacy.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:06

, if it's there and sometimes the decision is to, uh, to rewrite it, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:09

If you can do that, , and.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:11

The trade works well for you, then that's the way, uh and that's also

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:14

the way I do it in some cases, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:16

But in a lot of cases, you just have to, uh, to make the legacy not legacy anymore.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:20

Um, and that means bringing in discipline, bringing in ways of working,

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:24

that you do stuff in small steps.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:26

And even on a, on a big people call it a monolith, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:30

You can transform that into a modulith like, which is, uh,

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:33

what you call it nowadays.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:34

in a lot of cases just creating a good modular system.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:39

That is, even that is just one deployable unit or maybe two or three, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:43

If you need some scalability in some places, um, is way faster

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:48

than all these other things.

Nico Krijnen: 00:12:50

And then creating all small microservices

Richard Bown: 00:12:53

something I was gonna say.

Richard Bown: 00:12:53

Yeah, I completely agree with you as well.

Richard Bown: 00:12:56

I think that's absolutely spot on.

Richard Bown: 00:12:57

You've gotta pick your horse for your course, essentially.

Richard Bown: 00:13:00

Um, however, there's a couple of things there.

Richard Bown: 00:13:03

Um, first of all, it is kind of inevitable these days that people

Richard Bown: 00:13:08

wanna build on the Kubernetes.

Richard Bown: 00:13:09

They wanna have stuff's CV based development essentially.

Richard Bown: 00:13:11

So a lot of the time where companies make a decision because it's gonna be,

Richard Bown: 00:13:15

it has to be the latest technology to attract people to that particular way.

Richard Bown: 00:13:19

Secondly, the around the way of working.

Richard Bown: 00:13:22

So you mentioned in order to create or get rid of legacy or control legacy, you

Richard Bown: 00:13:26

have to be very structured in the way you work, but also you need to be structured

Richard Bown: 00:13:29

in the way you work anyway, essentially.

Richard Bown: 00:13:30

So it's kind of, it's not creating, legacy is being structured

Richard Bown: 00:13:35

as well as fixing legacy.

Richard Bown: 00:13:36

So it's the same approaches essentially just from different balls

Richard Bown: 00:13:40

of mud or scales of ball of mud.

Nico Krijnen: 00:13:42

So I think if you work on something new, you, you

Nico Krijnen: 00:13:44

should also always, do it in that way, uh, as well, probably, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:13:47

Because, uh, otherwise you're gonna end up with, with a legacy, which

Nico Krijnen: 00:13:51

you don't want to be, want it to be.

Nico Krijnen: 00:13:53

But still in our industry, I mean, how many places do you see that

Nico Krijnen: 00:13:55

do not have some legacy system?

Nico Krijnen: 00:13:57

I think as an industry we're, we're still definitely not in control here yet.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:01

Um, and there's a lot of.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:04

Knowledge right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:05

On how to do these things better, but somehow we are not managing to apply it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:09

So that's also why I think why I'm talking at conferences and spreading

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:13

this knowledge because I think it's important to help the industry to

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:16

realize this and also to find ways to get it under control, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:20

And help people get it under control, , because, um, , we're

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:23

building more and more software.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:25

And, if we're not doing it the right way, we're just building, a lot more legacy.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:29

And I don't want to be there.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:31

I don't want to work on more legacy, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:33

At the same time, there's all these nice shiny little toys out there.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:36

And we're still engineers.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:38

We like playing with, with toys, at least I do.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:42

Um, and, uh, the latest and greatest stuff is always better than the old stuff.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:46

and in a lot of cases these new toys, uh, Are created to solve a problem, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:51

Kubernetes is there to solve a certain problem as well.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:53

Uh, I just don't think it's, it's there to solve every problem.

Nico Krijnen: 00:14:57

I mean I've, I've worked with it and there's definitely a lot of

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:00

value in, in the way stuff is there.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:03

Um, it's also way too complicated for a lot of environments, I think.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:06

Right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:06

I think the ease with which, organizations now adopt Kubernetes

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:11

and under underestimated complexity, I think that's quite scary, to be honest.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:16

Um, especially if you see how cloud vendors are actually taking a lot

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:21

of complexity away from you and how you're trying to get it again.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:25

Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:25

Uh, on the other hand, you, you sort of are in control of, of a lot of.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:29

Areas, at least it may feel like that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:32

Uh, so that's, um, I always like to be in that situation as well.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:35

Right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:36

I mean, I remember that, um, when we built that, that product that I was

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:40

talking about long ago when we started on that, uh, one of the big things that

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:44

I really liked, Or the, the good choices I think we made is that we actually

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:47

took everything under our own control.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:49

We didn't depend on third party vendors or anything to, uh, to help us.

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:54

We made sort of a buy versus build decision at early on, and the, the first

Nico Krijnen: 00:15:58

time we did, okay, we'll just buy part of it and built another piece, and later

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:03

on, yeah, that vendor was just, you know, the whole industry in that area wasn't

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:06

moving at the pace that we needed, so, We changed the decision and we said,

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:10

okay, we're just gonna build everything.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:12

Uh, so we control everything and control the evolution that we need.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:16

Um, and that really, uh, played out very well for us at that point.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:20

Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:20

But as a, it needs to be a conscious decision.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:23

And I think in a lot of cases now, people are making decision based on

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:26

whatever is shiny or whatever vendors you're talking about or, or whatever

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:30

consultants are talking about.

Richard Bown: 00:16:32

Oh, I think it was always been like that, hasn't it?

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:35

Yeah, it is.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:36

Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:36

But, uh, that's not the, that's not the way it should be, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:40

Uh, you, you should make, uh, trade offs based on what you really need.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:43

But yeah, that's really hard always.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:46

I think in a lot of cases People underestimate the value of

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:49

just sticking with the stuff that you know and can handle.

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:53

Uh, and that means less shiny, less toys, but stuff that you can move

Nico Krijnen: 00:16:58

fast with and that is, I think, usually quite underestimated.

Richard Bown: 00:17:02

I'm, I'm suddenly thinking.

Richard Bown: 00:17:04

This is, you are almost describing legacy, but it's kind of optimized,

Richard Bown: 00:17:07

so it's like a, you've gone through the process of improving your system.

Richard Bown: 00:17:10

Everyone understands how it all works.

Richard Bown: 00:17:12

Once you've got an optimized legacy system, essentially that's the

Richard Bown: 00:17:15

sweet spot in some ways because you could, everyone's familiar with it.

Richard Bown: 00:17:18

They know what the tools are like, they know how to extend it, and,

Richard Bown: 00:17:20

and it's also simple to deploy and it's easy to, to get releases out.

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:25

Yeah, but that's not how people experience legacy, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:27

So I think if you take the word legacy out, but say a well organized, structured

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:31

system that people know and understand.

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:33

That's not legacy, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:34

Because I think a big portion of legacy is that people don't understand how the

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:38

system works or what it's supposed to do, or at least do, or pieces of it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:42

There are, very good reasons for it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:44

Using new technology on certain stuff.

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:47

you really need to understand the, the field, and I think that's where

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:50

domain driven design, again, has a good role to play, is that it

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:54

helps you to understand a domain.

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:56

It helps you to understand the problem space.

Nico Krijnen: 00:17:59

And once you understand that, that really helps you to, um, to make better decisions

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:04

about the stuff that you're gonna do.

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:06

And maybe.

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:07

Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:07

And I think also combining product thinking with domain-driven design

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:11

is really powerful space that's being explored by the community at the moment.

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:15

I think that is even more powerful because then you're also starting

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:17

to, uh, think a lot about, okay, what's important for our users?

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:21

Even makes the decision more targeted and then maybe there are cases which, cause

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:27

I experienced them, where it's good to use some experimental technology to do

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:31

something that nobody else has ever done because it's gonna put you in a space

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:35

where nobody is and where you can solve problems that nobody else can solve.

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:40

And obviously that's a, from a business point of view, a very good place to be.

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:44

So, If technology helps you there then maybe that's the the

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:49

thing you have to do, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:51

But then you have to be conscious that it's gonna be a trade off, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:18:53

It means you have learning curves.

Richard Bown: 00:18:55

Or you make it an experiment, you just say it's a mark.

Richard Bown: 00:18:57

It's almost a marketing experiment.

Richard Bown: 00:18:58

You throw it away.

Richard Bown: 00:18:59

So if it doesn't work, fine, we, we, we move on fast.

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:02

A lot of problems in those cases, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:03

Is that you, people don't throw it away, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:06

It's, uh, it's a marketing experience, uh, but then it's somewhat successful

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:10

and just lingers on and becomes another legacy stone that you have to carry along.

Richard Bown: 00:19:14

Yeah, that, that links onto to a nice point, um,

Richard Bown: 00:19:18

around exactly that exactly.

Richard Bown: 00:19:21

Attempts to fix legacy.

Richard Bown: 00:19:23

You must have seen this as well, where people have kind of come in and

Richard Bown: 00:19:25

say, oh, this is a, like a monolith.

Richard Bown: 00:19:27

We need to split it up.

Richard Bown: 00:19:28

And suddenly you end up with a monolith plus a couple of microservices,

Richard Bown: 00:19:31

plus some other pieces in an attempt to do the right thing, but not.

Richard Bown: 00:19:34

Carrying it through.

Richard Bown: 00:19:36

I've seen that.

Richard Bown: 00:19:36

I'm sure you have too.

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:38

Yep.

Richard Bown: 00:19:38

It's in that, at that point, you're kind of

Richard Bown: 00:19:40

screwed both ways, aren't you?

Richard Bown: 00:19:42

Because you kind of, you can get, you can get a system into a point where

Richard Bown: 00:19:45

you can't really go anywhere with it.

Richard Bown: 00:19:47

You and that point, you have to just throw it away or just leave it, you know,

Richard Bown: 00:19:50

because it becomes a bit of everything.

Richard Bown: 00:19:51

It's a Frankenstein.

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:53

Yep.

Richard Bown: 00:19:53

yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:19:54

How would you approach that?

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:55

Well, I, again, I would try to take the Frankenstein out of

Nico Krijnen: 00:19:58

it, not accept that it's a lost cause.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:00

And sometimes it is, right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:01

You just have to throw it away.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:02

But to be honest, I think in a lot of case, people don't realize that you

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:05

can still make it work, But you have to then probably make sure that you

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:10

start, rewriting the parts that really nobody understands anymore, get the

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:14

team like the, and the domain experts together and have them solve that

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:19

piece together so everybody understands that part of the software anymore.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:22

And then you probably don't need the old part anymore and you can turn

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:26

it off and you only have to pick out pieces of that legacy part and,

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:31

uh, and chop away at it bit by bit.

Richard Bown: 00:20:34

Just go back into that for one minute because, uh, you defined

Richard Bown: 00:20:38

a legacy system is something which.

Richard Bown: 00:20:40

Is not supportable anymore.

Richard Bown: 00:20:41

Is that right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:43

No, it's a, there's a bunch of definitions, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:45

I think Michael Feathers has a nice, nice one where he says, yes, a legacy system

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:49

is just a system that doesn't have tests.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:51

Um, that I think in a lot of cases that's the case.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:54

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:54

A lot of peop systems without tests, uh, become legacy, but

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:57

it's not necessarily the case.

Nico Krijnen: 00:20:59

What I've seen so far, it is usually the point where people don't

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:02

understand how a system works anymore.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:05

Uh, and it can have a lot of reasons, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:06

Can be because there are no tests.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:08

Cause then, uh, or because the tests that are there are really poorly written,

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:11

in some cases, it's because the people with the knowledge about the system

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:15

left or, some new people joined that have a very different idea about what it

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:19

should be, start changing it and then.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:22

Only do the change halfway you could say.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:23

So you get sort of two systems or two different ways of working in, in one.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:28

That's also what, what we talked about earlier.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:31

System nowadays are very complex, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:33

Distributed systems where multiple people are always working.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:36

Uh, this is not just one person working on it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:39

This consistency is very powerful to have in a system, but it's also

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:43

really hard to maintain, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:46

So you have to be very disciplined.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:48

Um, And, um, I've been in the situation.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:51

Why did the system that I once built, uh, over the years, it, it wasn't

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:55

the system that I built anymore.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:57

Also, it didn't follow the principles that we set out at the start.

Nico Krijnen: 00:21:59

I mean, we wrote all the documentation about, uh, architecture principles

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:02

and those kind of things that we wanted to follow, but new people

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:05

join and at some point there's multiple teams working on it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:08

And, uh, There's is no way you, you can completely control that,

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:13

especially if you try to do it like two things as documentation.

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:16

Cuz yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:17

Whoever finds and reads these things anyway.

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:19

So I think one of the things that I'm also trying with these workshops is automate

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:23

a ways to enforce these things, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:24

So, , in the workshop you encounter something that's called, uh, arc Unit,

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:29

which allows you in your pipeline check or you compile time or test

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:32

time, check that, uh, the architecture that you have in mind is not violated.

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:37

Uh, so these kind of things really help to also help juniors that

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:40

started on a, on a project or even other, uh, other coders that have

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:44

a different idea to, to understand why these things are there, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:48

Because there is something that will prevent them from, uh, building that

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:53

version of the code if they, if they don't follow the, the intention.

Nico Krijnen: 00:22:57

So again, it comes, it comes down to discipline again.

Nico Krijnen: 00:23:00

Um, and that's, that's hard.

Nico Krijnen: 00:23:03

And also not a comfortable place to be, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:23:05

Because, uh, discipline takes effort.

Nico Krijnen: 00:23:07

Uh, just doing your thing is a lot easier.

Richard Bown: 00:23:10

Exactly, and then people move on as well.

Richard Bown: 00:23:12

That's the thing.

Richard Bown: 00:23:12

If there's a, there's a churn, continuous churn of developers, which can happen

Richard Bown: 00:23:15

a lot of times, a lot of places.

Richard Bown: 00:23:17

Then there's disruption, and then disruption means things slow down.

Richard Bown: 00:23:20

Of course, when CH teams change and then pressure comes on to deliver and suddenly

Richard Bown: 00:23:25

ADRs, what ADRs, you know, so it's.

Richard Bown: 00:23:28

Yeah, it's that social element of coding, which is so important.

Richard Bown: 00:23:33

But not just the, not just the collaboration, but also the way

Richard Bown: 00:23:36

that we pass on information.

Richard Bown: 00:23:38

In fact, something you said about writing documentation or reading documentation.

Richard Bown: 00:23:41

I mean, that's the thing that, that I always do.

Richard Bown: 00:23:42

I always try and find documentation as soon as I start a job.

Richard Bown: 00:23:44

I'm trying to learn myself from the code how, how, what the architecture is, and.

Richard Bown: 00:23:48

How, how many places do I turn up and I say, well, where's, where's a picture

Richard Bown: 00:23:52

of the arch of, of an architecture view?

Richard Bown: 00:23:54

And no one can show me anything that's even up to date or

Richard Bown: 00:23:56

relevant updated in last year.

Richard Bown: 00:23:58

That's surely gotta be the starting point for anyone coming into the system.

Richard Bown: 00:24:01

But, uh, everyone learns differently.

Richard Bown: 00:24:03

That's, that's fine.

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:05

Yeah, so we talked about visual, uh, stuff earlier, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:08

stuff visual, I think is always super important to have at least one visual

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:12

in your, in your project, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:14

That you represent your architecture and, um, right, the high level

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:19

overview of what the system is supposed to be, how it's supposed to work,

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:22

just the high level mental model.

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:24

So everybody is, Able to talk about it, uh, and understand

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:28

it in, in a similar way.

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:29

if you have something like that and you make sure that you constantly

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:32

use it in the discussions that you have, you're gonna keep it up to date.

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:35

Because when you're having a discussion about it, you're

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:37

changing something, you're, you know, you have to change it, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:39

So, uh, and the trick there is I think, to.

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:45

And at Luminus we have our Luminus way of working, uh, which sort of a document that

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:49

we try to help everyone here with to sort of have some principles and guidelines

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:54

to follow on how you do these things.

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:55

And we have a sectional documentation there, which says try to write the

Nico Krijnen: 00:24:59

minimal amount that you can, right, that you need, but that you are sure

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:03

that you can keep up to date over time.

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:05

Cuz uh, in a lot of cases I see people producing just tons

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:09

and tons of documentation.

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:11

But yeah, there's no way you're gonna keep that up to date.

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:13

So, Um, another approach I really like is taking, uh, like visualizations

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:20

out of the actual reality, which is the, the code, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:23

Um, so nowadays there's more and more tooling that allows you to do that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:27

That's way more useful than having, something that you

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:30

have to maintain manually.

Richard Bown: 00:25:31

Well, indeed.

Richard Bown: 00:25:32

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:25:32

I think that's, that's important as well.

Richard Bown: 00:25:34

I was gonna ask, have you used C4 diagrams at all?

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:37

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:38

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:38

I'm, I'm, to be honest, I'm a big fan of, uh, of c4.

Nico Krijnen: 00:25:41

I really, uh, um, like that concept, um,

Richard Bown: 00:25:46

Do you find that, um, that people look at you funny though

Richard Bown: 00:25:49

because you're like, when I, cause I'm basically C4 makes complete sense to

Richard Bown: 00:25:53

me as well and the context, the, the top level box is the most important

Richard Bown: 00:25:56

part of any, anything for me there.

Richard Bown: 00:25:58

Um, I think it's the most warm part of anything.

Richard Bown: 00:25:59

I, I will just stick with the context for you to be honest.

Richard Bown: 00:26:01

I really want to go into components or anything even, but,

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:04

Don't agree.

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:04

Totally

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:05

agree.

Richard Bown: 00:26:06

But I get looked at weird now because I kind of got, I draw these

Richard Bown: 00:26:09

blobs and I've had people, actors and stuff, and I say, this is our system.

Richard Bown: 00:26:12

And people go, well, there's, where's the, where's the architecture?

Richard Bown: 00:26:15

Where's the interface here?

Richard Bown: 00:26:16

Where's the network?

Richard Bown: 00:26:16

Where's the whatever?

Richard Bown: 00:26:17

And I'm like, don't forget it.

Richard Bown: 00:26:19

Forget about that.

Richard Bown: 00:26:19

We don't need to worry about that.

Richard Bown: 00:26:20

We need to know the actors.

Richard Bown: 00:26:21

We need to have the systems.

Richard Bown: 00:26:22

And that's it.

Richard Bown: 00:26:23

You know, these blobs.

Richard Bown: 00:26:24

Um, and I kind of like, I'm kind of second guessing myself now because I go into

Richard Bown: 00:26:28

meetings and I present this and, they kind of like, they've already raised all these

Richard Bown: 00:26:30

questions at a detailed level and I'm like, I'll, I'll have a meeting with 'em.

Richard Bown: 00:26:33

I'll say, listen, that's not important.

Richard Bown: 00:26:35

All we need to understand is the interactions at this level, and

Richard Bown: 00:26:37

then we can dig in into the details later or maybe we don't need to.

Richard Bown: 00:26:40

That's the point.

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:42

Yeah, and I think like C4 does it pretty well, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:45

And you have the system level and that, uh, the container level is

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:48

usually quite useful still as well.

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:50

But the focus there is on giving you the context of where your

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:53

system operates in, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:54

All the things that are cited.

Nico Krijnen: 00:26:57

Um, and I think C4 does it on a, like more technical level

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:00

or you still see the actors.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:02

So, uh, it forces you if you do it right to, uh, to put a

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:06

lot of details in there, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:08

You, you, for every system and for every, every container there, you,

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:12

you describe as purpose, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:13

You describe its relation to other pieces you describe the kind

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:16

of technology that it's using.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:18

So it gives usually a lot of information already.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:20

Um, at least when you come into a project, I think a lot of, I, I see

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:24

a lot of my colleagues also, they create these kind of diagrams when

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:27

they come into a project just to get an understanding and they enrich it, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:31

They give it back to the project to make sure it, it stays there.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:34

Actually had a talk with Simon Brown, last year, uh, at one of the

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:37

conferences where we Ran into each other.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:39

And, um, so I was playing with the idea of, of wouldn't it be nice if

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:43

we can have to sort of always up to date documentation also on that level.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:47

Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:48

And, uh, so I had a discussion with him about that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:50

And the outcome that we came to is that well actually the real value

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:54

of that kind of high level diagram is not so much having an up-to

Nico Krijnen: 00:27:57

date version of it It is drawing it together with the people working on it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:01

Right.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:01

And that act of drawing it.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:04

Yeah.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:04

You sort of bring up the knowledge from the group, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:07

You get all the knowledge about how the system works together and

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:10

you create a shared mental model.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:12

And, uh, I think a lot of collaborative techniques also

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:15

in the domain of design do that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:17

And a, uh, I think that's, that's the bigger value, just not just the image, but

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:21

the mental model that you create together.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:23

Um, so to automate it wouldn't do that justice, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:27

Because you wouldn't be able to have that collaboration going.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:30

So, uh, um, yeah, I think, uh, that's also important to realize.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:36

Some diagrams you just have to draw.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:38

Uh, and that's fine.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:40

Uh, you can't automate everything.

Nico Krijnen: 00:28:42

There's essentially a lot of value in not automating it.

Richard Bown: 00:28:45

Exactly.

Richard Bown: 00:28:45

It drives a conversation.

Richard Bown: 00:28:46

That's the whole point, I think.

Richard Bown: 00:28:47

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:28:48

Um, so apart from c4, cause C4 has some, is it the Structurized

Richard Bown: 00:28:51

tool or the framework as well, which allows you to, um, to model.

Richard Bown: 00:28:56

There's some, there's some more kind of, uh, loose, loosely coupled ones, I suppose

Richard Bown: 00:29:00

you could say, which allows you to just draw the diagrams without having to set

Richard Bown: 00:29:03

up relationships and stuff, which is cool.

Richard Bown: 00:29:05

Any other tools that you would recommend as well, or mo or models, um, that you

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:09

Les.

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:09

Yeah, so I think in this space, like giving context , about a system, what I

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:13

think is really useful to draw a context map like from DDD, which essentially is

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:18

like the high level context overview of, a system, but then more focused on the

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:24

communication patterns between systems and especially also between teams, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:28

Cause uh, context maps are a lot about the organizational

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:31

structure that you're dealing with.

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:33

Um, and then you draw them.

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:35

From the point of view from the team, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:38

And then looking outward, what are the, the other systems and teams that

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:41

we're, uh, that we're dealing with and how, what is our relationship there?

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:47

And, uh, just being aware of that.

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:49

Being aware of what relationship you have.

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:51

Like are you downstream?

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:52

Are you upstream?

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:54

Uh, are you going separate ways?

Nico Krijnen: 00:29:57

Like all these things are important to understand or if,

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:00

do we have a shared kernel?

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:01

These kind of things are important to understand cuz it gives you.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:04

A mode of operating, uh, on that relationship.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:07

And yeah, being aware of that is really important.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:10

And I think in a lot of case people are not aware of it, right?

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:12

So, and that leaves them to maybe communicate or expect things that are

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:16

not to be expected of that relationship.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:19

So creating these context maps, uh, is I think, very useful as well.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:23

So I say, yeah, uh, a high level C4 diagram and a context map.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:27

I think those were, would be the, the good ones to get a, a feel for, uh,

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:32

how, uh, well, when I, when I would onboard on a, on a team, it would be

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:36

lovely if we would have these things.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:37

And then I think the other thing you really need to have is like a

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:40

business model canvas for the part of the, uh, the part that you're

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:44

working on to understand, okay, what is the business you're trying to do?

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:48

Why are we actually building the system?

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:51

So these kind of things just to, to give you an understanding on the, the

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:54

business domain that you're working in.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:56

Don't see them being shared in a lot of places.

Nico Krijnen: 00:30:59

But yeah, I think it would be great if every project would have those.

Richard Bown: 00:31:03

Yeah, you'd hope so.

Richard Bown: 00:31:04

But yeah, again, I think the, the temptation is always for everybody to

Richard Bown: 00:31:07

prove their worth on any project and people who are kind of developer or either

Richard Bown: 00:31:12

your developers or your bas or whatever role you play, project managers, everyone

Richard Bown: 00:31:16

wants to show that they know stuff.

Richard Bown: 00:31:17

So they, they want to break out the tools, they wanna break out

Richard Bown: 00:31:19

the low level stuff and get diving on details and show activity.

Richard Bown: 00:31:24

Through busy work a lot of the time and this kind of helicopter view, context

Richard Bown: 00:31:28

view kind of stuff is, it's rare.

Richard Bown: 00:31:30

It's rare to see and it's, it's a shame I think because yeah, all the stuff that

Richard Bown: 00:31:33

we've talked about the, yeah, finding legacy, building legacy before even

Richard Bown: 00:31:38

you built anything, you know, comes through rushing ahead a lot of the

Richard Bown: 00:31:41

time rather than taking a bit of time, stepping back and just saying, okay,

Richard Bown: 00:31:44

what are we trying to achieve here?

Richard Bown: 00:31:45

And can we agree on that, at least through this collaborative process.

. Nico Krijnen: 00:31:49

And then again, we don't want to get the impression cuz that

. Nico Krijnen: 00:31:52

that's also an impression that a lot of people have from domain driven design.

. Nico Krijnen: 00:31:55

That it means you start to do a lot of design upfront.

. Nico Krijnen: 00:31:58

Uh, but actually that's, that's still not what you do.

. Nico Krijnen: 00:32:00

You really try to do it it, or you actually do it small.

. Nico Krijnen: 00:32:03

You do a bit of thinking there, but then you try to bring it into

. Nico Krijnen: 00:32:06

practice and see if it works.

. Nico Krijnen: 00:32:08

Because then you'll learn whether it's actually the case.

. Nico Krijnen: 00:32:10

So, uh, uh, definitely a bit more thinking up ahead, but not too much

Richard Bown: 00:32:15

Awesome.

Richard Bown: 00:32:15

Um, brilliant.

Richard Bown: 00:32:16

Well, Nico, this has been brilliant.

Richard Bown: 00:32:17

I I'll share a few things I think with our listeners.

Richard Bown: 00:32:20

Um, you mentioned this thing, the arc uh, plugin, um, in the

Nico Krijnen: 00:32:24

our unity.

Richard Bown: 00:32:25

arc units.

Richard Bown: 00:32:26

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:32:26

So maybe you could share the link with me for that.

Richard Bown: 00:32:28

That'd be

Nico Krijnen: 00:32:28

yeah, sure will do.

Richard Bown: 00:32:29

it's abl that, that sounds really interesting.

Richard Bown: 00:32:31

I want, that's myself.

Richard Bown: 00:32:32

I'll share a couple of other links about various things including the,

Richard Bown: 00:32:35

the DD meetup and, and DD Europe.

Richard Bown: 00:32:37

That'd be great.

Nico Krijnen: 00:32:38

Yeah.

Richard Bown: 00:32:38

like to say thank you so much for joining me.

Richard Bown: 00:32:40

It's been really good fun.

Nico Krijnen: 00:32:41

Yeah, same here.

Richard Bown: 00:32:43

Thank you so much to Nico for joining me today.

Richard Bown: 00:32:46

I hope you enjoyed the episode as much as I did.

Richard Bown: 00:32:48

I will include in the show notes, links to Nico's speaking engagements in his

Richard Bown: 00:32:52

workshops, and please join me again next time on the next episode of Loving Legacy.