Devdays - Unstacked Engineering Conference

“Software design as code” still sounds abstract to many teams.

In practice, architecture diagrams, ADRs, documentation, and design decisions often live separately from the systems they describe. They become outdated quickly, hard to maintain, or disconnected from the actual implementation.

This 1-day workshop with Marcin Samsonowski explores a different approach.

You’ll work through how software design can become versioned, automated, and integrated directly into the development lifecycle using structured notations like UML, BPMN, and C4, maintained as code with tools such as Mermaid, PlantUML, and Structurizr.

The workshop also explores how AI can help generate, evolve, and keep these artefacts aligned with the codebase over time.

The focus is on making design part of the system itself, choosing the right level of automation for your context, and using AI to close the loop between design, implementation, and documentation.

Workshop: Software Design as Code - from Concepts to AI-driven Automation
22 September · Iași, Romania

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

AI can already generate code faster than most teams can review it.

What becomes harder is designing systems that can still evolve once all that code starts accumulating.

That’s why modular design matters more now than ever. And why Balanced Coupling can become a superpower in the age of AI-assisted software engineering.

In this 2-day workshop, Vlad Khononov explores the Balanced Coupling model and how it can be used to make design decisions that keep systems adaptable as complexity grows.

You’ll apply the model directly to real design problems, from high-level architecture down to object interactions, while also learning how to work with coding agents to produce systems that hold up over time.

You leave with a tool you can use the next day to get genuinely better software out of AI, along with practical ways of thinking about modularity, complexity, and long-term system evolution.

Workshop: Hands On Balanced Coupling
21–22 September · Iași, Romania

→ Workshop tickets are available:
https://www.devdays.ro/

Meet Vlad Khononov, author and software architect.

Vlad focuses on making sense of complex domains, untangling systems that have grown over time, and helping teams understand how structure and decisions shape what a system becomes.

Over the years, he’s worked across different roles, from hands-on engineering to architecture, always close to systems that had to evolve under real constraints.

His work focuses on understanding how systems behave and how to design them so they can evolve without becoming fragile.

Some of you might know his work through his books Learning Domain-Driven Design and Balancing Coupling in Software Design.

He was on our stage a few years ago, and returns this year with a new perspective on how systems grow and where they become difficult to change.

Talk: AI — The Golden Age of Modularity (or Why Robots Hate Big Balls of Mud)
Workshop: Hands On Balanced Coupling

→ https://www.devdays.ro/