Leaving Qandidate, off to Coolblue

After I had a very interesting conversation with the developers behind the Broadway framework for CQRS and event sourcing the day wasn’t over for me yet. I walked about one kilometer to the north to meet Paul de Raaij, who is a senior developer at Coolblue, a company which sells and delivers all kinds of - mostly - electrical consumer devices. Their headquarters are very close to the new and shiny Rotterdam Central station. The company itself is doing quite well. With 1000+ employees they keep needing more office space.

Visiting Qandidate in Rotterdam

Last Thursday I had the honor of meeting (part of the) Broadway team: three very smart developers working for Qandidate in central Rotterdam: Gediminas Šedbaras, Willem-Jan Zijderveld and Fritsjan. A short walk from the train station brought me to their office, where we talked about CQRS, event sourcing and some of the practical aspects of using the Broadway framework.

As you may have read I’ve been experimenting with Broadway extensively during these last weeks. Knowing a lot about the theory behind it, it was really nice to see how everything worked so smoothly. I had some questions however, which have now been answered (thank you guys for taking the time to do this!).

Event sourcing with Broadway

At the Dutch PHP Conference I attended a workshop by Beau Simensen and Willem-Jan Zijderveld. They showed us some examples of how to work with Broadway, a framework for event sourcing, with full Symfony integration, created by the smart people at Qandidate.

During my two weeks of funemployment, before starting my new job at Ibuildings, I decided to recreate one of my previous projects using Broadway. As it turns out, it’s a great framework that’s quite easy to use and is very powerful at the same time. Even though it’s not a stable package (as in, it’s still in the 0.x version range), I think it’s safe to depend on it.