At the end of September 2014, I’ll be making a trip to New York to go and see the guys from Particular Software and a whole slew of other excellent geeks. I’m really excited about this experience. I have been using NServiceBus for many years and I am big fan of the way of thinking of Udi Dahan as he shares it in his famous Advanced Distributed Systems Design (ADSD) training for a long time. I attended the ADSD course in April 2010 and it shook me to my foundations. Udi described acceptance of what he presented as a choice between taking the red pill or the blue pill, and he wasn’t kidding. Udi questions a lot of assumptions about systems architecture and comes to some radically different conclusions than the mainstream. Thinking about things in the Service-Oriented way of the ADSD mindset and embracing the infrastructure provided by NServiceBus and the rest of the Particular Platform that enables a straightforward way of implementing highly reliable and highly scalable systems is quite a departure. Every day during the training I felt exhausted and beaten up, like I’d been dragged up and down the street behind a speeding car. It was a grueling five days of consuming from a fire hose.
So now I’ll get to experience the conference about NServiceBus to see what folks are doing with the fantastic product that is now all grown up and has become a fully-featured platform at NSBCon. I can remember at times pitching NServiceBus and getting resistance and whining because of a lack of graphical tooling. That stuff is all there now. It will be great to meet some brilliant geeks and see what people from around the globe are doing with the tools I find so appealing. Of course Udi Dahan will be at the conference and speaking, but the docket also includes other huge names, such as Oren Eini, Ted Neward, Richard Campbell, and Carl Franklin. I’ll especially be looking forward to hearing from Andreas Ohlund and Jimmy Bogard.
The day after the conference, there will be another day that is the ADSD Unconference for alumni of the course to gather and share experiences and opinions on the application of what Udi preaches. This is what is really exciting to me. The content of the ADSD course was a bit of a combination of a crash course in the practical computer science that was missing from college, Domain-Driven Design with some twists, and applying DDD and NServiceBus to large-scale problems. There is no way to do the 5 days of baptism by fire justice by trying to describe it in a block of text consumable in the reasonable amount of time. It is something that has to be experienced. With his focus on being the CEO of Particular, Udi has stated he’s not teaching the course anymore (though that may not be absolutely true), but it is available on video. Experiencing this gathering of largely like minds in software and systems architecture and cloud deployments and such will be something I would not want to miss.