Stories on Facilitating Software Architecture & Design - Virtual Domain-Driven Design
What I find interesting — and this isn't visible on the site yet — is that these start to connect with heuristics from earlier episodes. Diana's complements one Paul Rayner shared: make implicit mental models explicit for objective collaboration. Three different practitioners, three different stories, and underneath all of them the same move: get what's inside people's heads into a shared, tangible space.
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In a recent episode,
@diana shared one that sits alongside it: design experiences instead of explaining more. When people resist change, the instinct is to add more explanation. Rarely works. Facilitation creates more lasting impact because people internalize what they discover through their own thinking.
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Gien's full heuristic: surface value-based preferences before choosing technical solutions. Before evaluating options, dig into what's driving the strong preference. Is it fear of skills becoming outdated? Concern about maintainability? Making that visible changes the whole conversation.
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What we try to do is different: invite practitioners to share a real story, then sit with them and extract the heuristics they've actually been working from. Something
@rebeccawb introduced into our community.
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When someone pushes hard for a specific technical solution, they're usually arguing from an underlying value they haven't made explicit yet.
That's a heuristic @selketjah shared in a recent episode of "Stories of Facilitating Software Architecture & Design" — a series I host with @roundcrisis and @ahl on Virtual DDD. Most architecture content gives you frameworks or opinions.
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Scaling AI in Production: AIOps, Architecture, and Human Oversight, Tue, Apr 7, 2026, 6:00 PM | Meetup
We are thrilled to welcome you to our 9th edition of AI Native Netherlands, hosted at the Miro headquarters in Amsterdam.
We look forward to seeing you again for another e
What I won't be doing is showing up with a neat framework and a confident answer. Honestly, nobody is a deep expert here yet, myself included. What I do bring is a healthy dose of skepticism and experience with software design, architecture, collaborative modelling and cognitive bias. My plan is to make this a conversation rather than a lecture, exploring how we keep architecture intentional and human-led when the tooling is moving faster than our understanding of it.
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My session is called "Facilitating Software Architecture While AI Agents Write the Code." The core tension I want to explore: developers have always made implicit architectural decisions, but AI acceleration means those decisions happen faster, and increasingly get delegated. When AI generates code based on incomplete context, assumptions get baked in as if they were intentional, and before long, nobody is quite sure why the system looks the way it does.
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The speed at which AI agents write code is no longer the bottleneck. Whether we understand what that code is actually doing, that's where it gets interesting.
On 7 April I'll be speaking at the AI Native Netherlands meetup at the Miro offices in Amsterdam.
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