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 programme 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 programme, 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
"Finally, a DDD workshop that didn't feel like a university lecture. We modelled a realistic domain, argued about boundaries, and left with patterns we implemented the following week."
"The socio-technical angle was eye-opening. Understanding Conway's Law changed how we approached our microservices migration."
"Stijn and the team don't just teach DDD, they've lived the struggles of implementing it in messy real-world situations. That credibility makes all the difference."
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.