- Date: September 21-25, 2026
- Location: Hydro at CSU Spur, Denver, CO

# Pre-Conference Workshops

Two days of focused, hands-on training with the practitioners shaping DDD, microservices, and AI delivery. Direct access to the instructor with your questions and your team's problems.

Workshops run 9am-5pm both days, Monday September 21 and Tuesday September 22, 2026, in Denver, Colorado. Tickets are sold separately from the conference and combine toward group discount tiers. [See pricing on the home page.](/#pricing)

## [Essential Domain-Driven Design](/content/workshops/essential-ddd.html)

**Instructor:** Paul Rayner  
Domain-driven design has a reputation for being complex, with layers of patterns, acronyms, and conflicting advice. This workshop cuts through the noise and gives you a solid foundation in the ideas, techniques, and skills that make DDD work in real project contexts.

## [Designing Microservices: Responsibilities, APIs and Collaborations](/content/workshops/designing-microservices.html)

**Instructor:** Chris Richardson  
The microservice architecture enables fast flow at scale, but it is far too easy to get service boundaries wrong and create a fragile distributed monolith. In this workshop, you will learn a structured, collaborative process for defining a microservice architecture with clear responsibilities, well-defined APIs, and explicit collaboration patterns.

## [AI-Assisted Software Architecture & Domain Discovery](/content/workshops/ai-assisted-architecture.html)

**Instructor:** Indu Alagarsamy  
AI won't simplify a complex system. But it can dramatically accelerate your understanding. Over two full days, learn how to use AI tools as a force multiplier for architectural and domain discovery in complex existing systems.

## [Build Your Own Coding Agent from Scratch](/content/workshops/build-your-own-coding-agent.html)

**Instructors:** Matt Wynne & Steven Diamante  
You use AI agents every day, but do you know what's actually happening under the hood? Build an agent from scratch, without any frameworks. Watch a basic chatbot evolve into a sophisticated agent with tools, conversation history, and guardrails, then explore evals, deterministic vs non-deterministic capabilities, and a competition between the agents you've built.

[View the full conference schedule →](/content/schedule/index.html)