Beyond the "Blue Book"
Domain-Driven Design has earned its reputation for being dense and academic. The books are essential, but they don't tell you how to introduce EventStorming to a sceptical team, or how to refactor a monolith into bounded contexts without halting feature delivery.
DDD Academy exists to close that gap.
Our workshops don't rehash textbook definitions of Aggregates or Bounded Contexts. Instead, we drop you into realistic scenarios: conflicting stakeholder requirements, domains that resist modelling, legacy code that fights back, and teams that need alignment before architecture.
You'll leave with patterns you can apply on Monday morning, not just concepts to think about.
What makes us different
- Real codebases, real constraints — We work with messy scenarios that mirror actual projects, not toy examples
- Practitioners, not career trainers — Every instructor actively consults on DDD implementations between workshops
- Collaborative learning — Small cohorts (max 16 people) with extensive hands-on exercises and group modelling sessions
- Socio-technical focus — We teach both the technical patterns and how to navigate the organisational challenges of implementing them
Curated by Aardling
The Academy program is built and curated by the Aardling team — practitioners who've spent years in the trenches implementing DDD at scale-ups and enterprises across Europe.
Gien Verschatse
Mathias Verraes
Stijn Vannieuwenhuyse
Thomas Coopman
Workshops by leading experts
While we curate the program, our workshops are delivered by renowned practitioners and thought leaders in their fields — from EventStorming pioneers to DDD book authors. Each instructor brings deep, hands-on experience from years of consulting and building systems.
What participants say
I got a great insight into Domain-Driven Design and concrete knowledge of how to use Strategic DDD as part of my strategic work and design tasks for my customers.
AAnders Olsen
Immeo
participant at Strategic Domain-Driven Design with Gien Verschatse in 2025
Powered by Aardling
DDD Academy is an initiative of Aardling, an international software strategy consultancy.
Between teaching, we're in the trenches consulting for scale-ups and enterprises. We help them untangle legacy systems, design socio-technical architectures that scale, and introduce DDD practices that stick.
The Academy shares the patterns we've refined through hundreds of hours of client work. Every workshop is informed by recent projects: the successes we want to repeat and the mistakes we've learned from.