Post #2174216

2026-05-02 19:01 UTC

I started reading Ralf Westphal’s ideas on #EventSourcing and like what I’m reading. I know very little about ES, but have had it on my radar for a long time now and his writing made it click for me. I also find his ideas on entity-less design intriguing. If you have advice for or against, resources, stories, libraries, event stores, etc. I’d be interested to tip my toes into this water! https://ralfwestphal.substack.com/p/command-context-consistency

Replies (3)

@peter@mastodon.gassner.io 2026-05-02 19:22

Oh dear, I started digging into Westphal’s older blog posts: he’s an anti-masker and a bit of an anti-vaxxer. Doesn’t say anything about the technical basis of his posts, of course, but about his thinking in general 🤷

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@theohonohan@graphics.social 2026-05-02 19:38

@peter@mastodon.gassner.io OK so if I understand event sourcing, the basic idea is to use a log rather than just storing the state. Butler Lampson calls this architectural principle the being vs becoming distinction. Since you have concerns about Westphal's thinking, I thought I would mention Lampson. I don't know if you are aware of his work – first, from 1983: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/acrobat-17.pdf and a recent update he wrote that might be more interesting and where he uses the being/becoming language: https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.02455

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@jitterted@sfba.social 2026-05-03 14:05

@peter@mastodon.gassner.io You may already know that ES is a current passion of mine. I have a couple of online talks (in addition to far too many hours of live streaming videos) about ES: https://ted.dev/talks/#event-sourcing-from-scratch-(nov.-25%2C-2025) along with my learning journal on the topic: https://ted.dev/tag/jitterticket/ Hope to give this talk at a Zürich user group meeting in November.

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