For our October event we are pleased to announce You Attended Talk: an introduction to event sourcing by Chris Riley who very generously stepped in at the last minute! With pizzas provided by Sharpe Recruitment, venue provided by Campus North and additional sponsorship from Opia.

The event will take place at Campus North, Carliol Square, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 6UF (map).

The event is free and open to all, but please sign up online so that we have an idea of numbers for the venue and catering. Feedback, suggestions and ideas for future topics are welcome on Twitter.

You Attended Talk: an introduction to event sourcing by Chris Riley

Imagine for a moment you work for a large online retailer specialising in household goods. One morning, the head of marketing comes to you and says "I've had this great idea we're going to send discount vouchers to anyone who's changed their address in the past 3 months; people who've recently moved are more likely to be buying new furniture. Could you retrieve a list of all these customers?" You explain to him your systems only store a customers current address and doesn't record when it was last changed, a new feature is added to the backlog and the head of marketing leaves a little disappointed.

What if you could build a system which was able to answer this kind of question without knowing it up front? A possible solution is to use event sourcing, being able to go back to any previous state of your data is just one advantage of using event sourcing in your application. Event sourcing is a total paradigm shift from the more traditional model of storing an application's current state and can appear to be a very unnatural way to think about and build a system. In this talk I'm going to show you examples of why event sourcing can be a superior model and cover some implementation considerations.

Chris is a freelance consultant based in York, Uk with experience working in the public sector, small and large companies throughout North Yorkshire. Chris has over 10 years experience with PHP and has a keen focus on both software architecture and none functional requirements such as security, performance and maintainability. In his free time, Chris can often be found producing or playing with experimental libraries and contributing to Zend framework.

After the event, many of us will be going to the Warerooms next door, for some liquid refreshments.