"DDD and Your ORM" at the Full-Stack NL meetup

My previous encounter with Full-Stack NL was in 2019, when I was invited by Peter Paul Keuler to talk about what I consider Advanced Web Application Architecture. It’s nice to be back at the PAQT office in 2026 (they moved across the street in the meantime) with a new talk. The talk uses an experimental “Choose Your Own Adventure” format.

Abstract

Over time, you’ve created lots of data models that are mapped to tables in your relational database. Now you want to untangle the “mess” using Domain-Driven Design practices and patterns. This is very exciting; you’re planning to separate your business domain into smaller subdomains, implemented by so-called Bounded Contexts, with explicit boundaries. But you are using an ORM, and the ORM knows about Entities, but it doesn’t care about Bounded Contexts. It allows you (and often requires you) to link remote concepts in the code, ruining those boundaries you imagined…

In this presentation, we’ll explore the real-world problems you’ll run into when trying to apply Domain-Driven Design patterns in an average framework/ORM-oriented code base. We cover central DDD concepts and indicate potential conflicts with the way frameworks and ORMs treat your data model. Of course, we’ll also consider workarounds and solutions.

Slides

Download the slides (PDF)