Yves Goeleven

What is an event

By Yves Goeleven / On 2023-08-11 10:00:00 / 3 Minutes Read
E

Many developers have the wrong mental model of an event.

Very often they think about an event as 'something that happened in the system'.

This definition isn't ideal, as it only allows to represent state changes.

A better definition is:

An event represents a meaningfull business decission taken, which alters the state of the system.

This definition allows to represent these decissions explictly and let the system adapt to them.

This makes distributed systems design a lot easier, and opens up new opportunities as well. a.o. polyglot persistence.

Examples

Bad: SalesOrderChanged, DeliveryCreated
Good: SalesOrderBooked, DeliveryConfirmed

About the author

YVES GOELEVEN

I've been a software architect for over 20 years.

My main areas of expertise are large scale distributed systems, progressive web applications, event driven architecture, domain driven design, event sourcing, messaging, and the Microsoft Azure platform.

As I've transitioned into the second half of my career, I made it my personal goal to train the next generation of software architects.

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