Last week, I had the privilege of running an EventStorming workshop with Andrea Magnorsky and leading a “Baking Domain Concepts Into Code” 2-hour hands-on session at ADAConf 2025 in Melbourne. The experience reminded me why I love this work - bringing people together to discover how collaborative modeling creates something special that no individual working alone can achieve.

Thursday: Full-Day EventStorming Workshop

The day before the conference, Andrea and I taught a full-day EventStorming workshop, titled “On the Same Page: EventStorming for Understanding Processes and Systems Together.” What struck me most was the energy in the room as participants worked through real-world scenarios, moving sticky notes around and discovering insights about how to approach modeling their domains.

The workshop format, highly participatory, creates an environment where people feel safe exploring complexity together. No prior EventStorming experience was required, and watching participants move from uncertainty to confidence as they modeled processes never gets old.

Some key moments:

• Discovering hidden domain events that revealed important business rules
• Identifying process bottlenecks through temporal modeling
• Uncovering bounded contexts based on discovered boundaries around pivotal events
• The “aha!” moments when participants saw how EventStorming could immediately apply to their current challenges

The EventStorming workshop reinforced some core truths about effective software design:

• Collaboration beats individual brilliance. The best insights came from diverse perspectives working together, not from any single expert.
• Visualization creates shared understanding. Putting domain events on a timeline made complexity tangible and discussable.
• An incremental approach builds confidence. By introducing only one concept/practice at a time, participants never felt lost and stayed confident throughout the workshop.

Friday: ADAConf Hands-On Session

ADAConf’s theme this year was “(Architectural) Change” - perfectly aligned with EventStorming’s strength in helping teams understand and respond to change in their organizations. My 2-hour hands-on session focused on practical techniques for connecting domain modeling using EventStorming with baking design concepts deeply into code. The Miro board with the domain background is available if you want to review it.

The response was encouraging. As one participant shared on LinkedIn:

“Loved how practical and collaborative this session was.”

Another participant called it their biggest takeaway from the entire conference:

“My absolute biggest takeaway? The event storming workshop with Paul Rayner. It was a masterclass in demonstrating the immense power of integrating domain concepts into code, drastically improving readability, maintainability, and testability. This is something I’m excited to implement more broadly!”

Rather than just presenting concepts, we worked through exercises that participants could take back to their teams. The conference’s focus on socio-technical systems thinking, evolutionary architecture, and collaborative design made it an ideal venue for exploring how EventStorming helps teams navigate technical and organizational change, and baking domain concepts into code creates software that is more amenable to supporting that change.

Communities Matter

The Australian DDD community’s commitment to learning and sharing creates opportunities for everyone to grow. This community is vibrant and engaged. ADAConf, which grew out of the Domain-Driven Design Australia meetup, exemplifies what happens when a community focuses on building software that’s:

• More valuable for users and owners
• More pleasant for builders and maintainers
• More collaborative in conception and design

Thanks to everyone who attended the workshop, came to my ADAConf session and made this first Australian teaching experience memorable. Thanks to Andrea for co-teaching our EventStorming workshop. I especially enjoyed the talks by Linda McIver and Diana Montalion that opened and closed the conference day.

Special thanks to the conference organizers — Chris Simon, Sonal Premi, and Alicia Cheah — and volunteers for creating such a welcoming venue for the community. The energy and curiosity of the Melbourne software community has me already looking forward to returning.

Coming to APAC: Virtual Workshop in December

If you’re in the APAC region and want this kind of hands-on learning experience, I’m running an EventStorming Facilitation Virtual Workshop scheduled specifically for APAC timezones:

December 2-5, 2025 4 sessions × 3 hours each

This intensive 12-hour virtual workshop covers:

• Big Picture EventStorming for discovering domain knowledge and system boundaries
• Process Modeling EventStorming for detailed workflow analysis and bottleneck identification
• Software Design techniques for applying EventStorming to feature discovery, design, and architecture decisions

The format is the same camera-on, participatory style that has worked so well in past virtual workshops. Small cohorts ensure direct interaction and personalized feedback. No prior EventStorming or DDD experience required.

Interested in EventStorming for your team? Whether you want to bring a workshop to your organization or attend a future public session, I’d love to discuss your challenges. Contact me via email →