Critter Stack Workshop at DevUp Next Week

If you’re planning on coming to my workshop, you’ll want .NET 8, Git, and some kind of Docker Desktop on your box to run the sample code I’ll use in the workshop. If Docker doesn’t work for you, you maybe want a local install of PostgreSQL and Rabbit MQ.

Hey folks, I’ll be giving the first ever workshop on building an Event Driven Architecture with the full “Critter Stack” at DevUp 2024 in St. Louis next week on Wednesday the 14th bright and early at 8:30 AM.

We’ll be working through a sample backend web service that also communicates with other headless services using Event Sourcing within a general CQRS architectural approach with the whole “Critter Stack. We’ll use Marten (over PostgreSQL) for our persistence strategy using both its event sourcing support and as a document database. We’ll combine that with Wolverine as a server side framework for background processing, asynchronous messaging, and even as an alternative HTTP endpoint framework. Lastly, just for fun, there’ll be guest appearances from other JasperFx tools like Alba and Oakton for automated integration testing and command line execution respectively.

So why would you want to come to this and what might you get out of it? I’m hoping the takeaways — even if you don’t intend to use Marten or Wolverine — will be:

• A good introduction to event sourcing as a technical approach and some of the real challenges you’ll face when building a system using event sourcing as a persistence strategy
• An understanding of what goes into building a robust CQRS system including dealing with transient errors, observability, concurrency, and how to best segment message processing to achieve self-healing systems
• Challenging the industry conventional wisdom about the efficacy of Hexagonal/Clean/Onion Architecture approaches really are when I show what a very low ceremony “vertical slice architecture” approach can be like with the Wolverine + Marten combination while still being robust, observable, highly testable, and still keeping infrastructure concerns out of the business logic
• Some exposure to Open Telemetry and general observability tooling for distributed systems you absolutely want if you don’t already have that
• Techniques for automating integration tests against an Event Driven Architecture

Because I’m absolutely in the business of promoting the “Critter Stack” tools, I’ll try to convince you that:

• Marten is already the most robust and feature rich solution for event sourcing in the .NET ecosystem while also being arguably the easiest to get up and going with
• How the Wolverine + Marten combination makes CQRS with Event Sourcing a much easier architectural pattern to use
• Wolverine’s emphasis on low ceremony code approaches can help systems be more successfully maintained over time by simply having much less noise code and layering in your systems while still being robust
• The “Critter Stack” has an excellent story for automated integration testing support that can do a lot to make your development efforts more successful
• Both Marten & Wolverine can help your teams achieve a low “time to first pull request” by doing a lot to configure necessary infrastructure like databases or message brokers on the fly for a better development experience

I’m excited, because this is my first opportunity to do a workshop on the “Critter Stack” tools, and I think we’ve got a very compelling technical story to tell about the tools! And if nothing else, I’m looking forward to any feedback that might help us improve the tools down the line.

And for any *ahem* older folks from St. Louis in my talk, I personally at the time that Jorge Orta was out at first and the Cards should have won that game.