Couple of months ago, just before the DDD Europe conference a question "Why there is no DDD community in London" struck my mind and didn't let me sleep (literally). If you think about it - it doesn't really make sense - especially that we have a good number of DDD Practitioners (or even book authors) in the city, DDD eXchange is the longest running conference and Skills Matter regularly organises DDD related trainings.

As a person that encourages people to do something about things they don't like I've decided to follow this advice myself and make use of the experience I gained by running a community in Poland. And this is how the DDD London community has started - I don't consider myself a DDD expert/guru, but to grow each other we don't need that - a good will, a bit of time and a place where you can meet is enough to start something great.

My goal from the very beginning was to integrate people from various tech niches and create a space where they can share their experience and knowledge. I do believe that to some extent we are already hitting that goal - depending on the topic - we are getting people using Java, Scala, C#, PHP, Ruby or JavaScript which is super positive.

That wouldn't happen without a place where we can run our meetups - fortunately for Londoners we have Wendy and her amazing team at Skills Matter who provide us with space, video recording, stationery and social media reach. This is really a great help and they do a lot for the community - I just want to say that every person that benefits from Code Node should say thank you for the effort they put in running this place :)

That said I'd like to thank as well all the speakers we hosted so far:

• Šarūnas Valaškevičius - talked about "EventFlow - a functional approach to CQRS/ES" (slides, video recording).

• Alberto Brandolini - gave his "The Precision Blade" in the brain talk and kindly agreed to make it a part of our meetup (video recording).

• Dan Haywood - showed us how is he "Closing the feedback loop with Apache Isis" (video recording).

• Paul Rayner - interactively discussed a problems of "Modelling Entity Lifecycle" and covered a lot of questions (sorry, no recording)

• Nick Tune - explained in his talk "Strategic and Collaborative Domain-Driven Design" why speaking Ubiquitous Language with Business and Domain Experts is crucial to effectively deliver a software project (video recording).

Our next meetup in August is going to have a bit different formula than usual - this time we are planning to run an Event Storming workshop and practice modelling complex processes with real Domain Experts (who kindly agreed to come and talk about their business).

As the intent of the workshop is to teach newcomers the technique we had to limit number of spaces and they actually run out in couple of hours. This is actually quite nice problem to have and we are working on running a second session in parallel and it looks like we will need to order another batch of sticky notes!

Last but not least - there are two more people that help running the whole thing - my Wife and Arturas. Without their help the meetup will not be as successful as it is, and I would like to thank them as well. That said if you think you could contribute back and help us running the group (either by speaking, or sponsoring or any other activity) please do get in touch - after all it's about building the Domain-Driven Design Community together!