L1
Honest Take — Before You Begin
Companion to SOFTWAREARCHITECTUREMASTERYCURRICULUM.md Honest reflections, no sugar coating.
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Course · 7 lessons
~53 hr
Advanced
Domain-Driven Design
Domain-Driven Design covers: DDD Distilled, Domain-Driven Design, DDD Toolbox, Communication Patterns. Master DDD's strategic and tactical patterns — bounded contexts, aggregates, entities, value objects, domain events, ubiquitous language. Learn to model complex business domains as software architecture. Rails ActiveRecord is an implementation of the Active Record pattern — one of the patterns Evans explicitly discusses as a tactical choice, not a strategic one. DDD says: your persistence strategy (Active Record, Data Mapper, Repository) should not dictate your domain model. In Rails, it does — and that is fine for simple domains. The moment your business logic outgrows your ActiveRecord models (500-line models, callbacks calling callbacks, models knowing about HTTP), you need DDD's boundaries. This module teaches you to recognize that moment and act on it.
reading · we frame, you read MIT or the canonical
taught · we author, no canonical fits
↺ spirals back to earlier lessons
Course locked
Complete Refactoring & Working with Legacy Code first.
This course unlocks once you've finished its prerequisite. Open prerequisite →
L2
DDD Distilled: The Weekend Read That Reframes Modeling
Somewhere in your codebase there is a model — call it Order — that means three different things. To checkout code it's a cart being paid for. To fulfillment code it's a package to…
primary
Alberto Brandolini: Event Storming (DDD Europe)
locked
L3
Domain-Driven Design: The Blue Book, Read for Depth
The most influential software design book of its generation opens with a hundred pages about talking to people. Most engineers pick up Evans expecting a pattern catalog, hit chapt…
primary
Alberto Brandolini: Event Storming (DDD Europe)
locked
L4
DDD Toolbox: Running the Workshops
Most DDD concepts take months to internalize. Event storming takes an afternoon. You book a room, cover a wall with paper, hand out orange stickies, and ask "what happens in this …
primary
Alberto Brandolini: Event Storming (DDD Europe)
locked
L5
Communication Patterns: Making Architecture Legible
The best architecture you never explained does not exist. What exists is whatever the team understood — from a stale diagram, a half-remembered meeting, a Slack thread. The diagra…
primary
Alberto Brandolini: Event Storming (DDD Europe)
locked
L6
Module Checklist
Work through each item before the checkpoint.
locked
L7
Project: Model a Domain with DDD
Pick a business domain you actually understand — logistics, property management, e-commerce — and model it the DDD way. The hard part isn't the vocabulary (aggregates, value objec…
locked
7 lessons. Read in order; spiral back when you need to. By the end you'll have used the core ideas twice — once on the abstract, once on something you'll meet at work next week.