Have you heard about Passive Aggressive Events or CRUD sourcing? Or maybe about the Clickbait event?

If you don’t, you better check the talk I gave at Kafka Summit 2024. Knowing only best practices is one side of the coin. Knowing what NOT to do can be even more important.

During the session, I explained the specifics of event modelling, starting with bad practices and knowing why and how to avoid them. I told the story about the project that aimed to modernise legacy software into the event-driven world. In theory, artificial, but in practice, none of the examples were made up. Either I made those mistakes on my own, or I saw them in my projects or helped to fix them for my clients.

I tried to make it both entertaining and educational, bitter and sweet. It is not easy when you’re not a native speaker. There’s a thin line between being funny and being silly.

The thin line is also between bad and good practices. And this thin line is: context.

By the way, I’m not a lucky guy, so I always try to be overprepared. I put a big effort into preparing the talk, and it paid off, as the comments were really positive.

That was a big relief for me, as it was my first time speaking for this community, and I wasn’t sure how my talk about event modelling anti-patterns would be seen.

Why unlucky? This time, the Wi-Fi on my laptop broke right before the talk. I also had in past cases like Windows Updates shutting my computer in the middle of the talk. After that, I have been taking two laptops with me for some time.

The talk also summarised my current article series about anti-patterns in event modelling. Here’s the full list:

• State Obsession,
• Property Sourcing,
• I’ll just add one more field.
• Clickbait event,
• Should you record multiple events from business logic?,
• Stream ids, event types prefixes and other event data you might not want to slice off.

Check also more general considerations:

• Events should be as small as possible, right?,
• What’s the difference between a command and an event?,
• Internal and external events, or how to design event-driven API,
• Event Streaming is not Event Sourcing!,
• Don’t let Event-Driven Architecture buzzwords fool you,
• How to design software architecture pragmatically,
• How to deal with privacy and GDPR in Event-Driven systems.

If you’d like to avoid those mistakes, don’t hesitate to contact me!. I’m here to help. Check my training page. A workshop is the most effective way to jump-start.

You can check recommendations on my Linked.in profile to see how other people liked working with me.

Watch also my talk about The Light and The Dark Side of the Event-Driven Design:

Also, fun fact: Kafka in Polish is pronounced as “kawka,” which means small coffee. Thus, the photo below.

Cheers!

Oskar

p.s. Ukraine is still under brutal Russian invasion. A lot of Ukrainian people are hurt, without shelter and need help. You can help in various ways, for instance, directly helping refugees, spreading awareness, putting pressure on your local government or companies. You can also support Ukraine by donating e.g. to Red Cross, Ukraine humanitarian organisation or donate Ambulances for Ukraine.