In-person workshop
Tame the Mess
A hands-on governance workshop for teams building distributed systems
I keep hearing the same story. A team starts building distributed systems — microservices, events, async APIs — and it works great. For a while. Then the complexity creeps in. Events nobody can explain. Services nobody owns. No schema strategy. No governance. Before you know it, you’ve got a distributed big ball of mud.
I’ve seen this pattern in dozens of organisations over the past decade. I built EventCatalog because I kept seeing the same gap. I wrote a book on event-driven architecture because the concepts were hard to explain. I gave talks at NDC, GOTO, and re:Invent because the problems kept coming up...
But tools and talks only go so far. Sometimes you need to sit in a room with your team, look honestly at where you are, and figure out where to start. That’s why I’m running this workshop.
— Dave
The problem
You started simple. Then you grew.
One service, a handful of events, a team that knew exactly what was happening. Then you grew. Now you have events nobody can explain. Schemas with no versioning strategy. Teams building the same thing in parallel without knowing it.
You have a distributed big ball of mud. And the worst part? You’re not even sure how you got here.
This is the governance problem. And almost every team building distributed systems will face it — most of them before they even know what to call it.
It doesn't have to be like this
Governance isn't about slowing down
It’s about putting the right things in place so you can keep moving fast — without the chaos catching up with you.
A schema versioning strategy. Clear ownership of your events. Documentation that lives with your systems, not in a wiki that’s already out of date. Standards and specifications that actually help your distributed architecture stay coherent as it grows.
These things aren’t complicated. They just need someone to say: this matters, here’s where to start, and here are the patterns other teams are using to get it right.
How messy is your architecture?
Find out in 30 seconds.
Chaos meter
Answer the questions below
Do you have a schema versioning strategy?
Can any team member find who owns an event?
Is your architecture documentation up to date?
Can new engineers discover existing events and services?
Do teams sometimes build things that already exist?
Do breaking changes ever surprise downstream consumers?
Can product owners understand the flow of data across services?
The workshop
Your team, your problems, real answers
I’ll start where you are. What problems do you have? Where does it hurt? What does your architecture actually look like right now — and who in the room has a different answer to that question than the person sitting next to them?
From there, we’ll work through what good governance looks like in practice together — schema design, versioning strategies, ownership models, discoverability, documentation that teams will actually use. Not theory. Real patterns from real systems, and the war wounds of doing this wrong.
You’ll leave with the beginning of your governance strategy. Something you can act on Monday morning.
Duration
1–2 days
Format
In-person or remote
Group size
8–15 people
Audience
Your team
Who it's for
Architects, engineers, product owners
Anyone building or maintaining distributed systems who wants to get ahead of the complexity — or get out from under it.
You don’t need to be in crisis to benefit. But if you are in crisis, this is for you too.
Haven't hit the wall
Get a head start and avoid the mess entirely.
In the middle of it
Get clarity and a concrete path forward.
Already deep in pain
Get validation, tools, and your first step out.
What you'll walk away with
Not slides. Something you can act on.
- A clearer picture of where your governance gaps are today
- Practical strategies for schema versioning, ownership, and discoverability
- An understanding of what good looks like — and what the path to get there looks like for your team
- Real-world patterns and approaches from other organisations who’ve solved these exact problems
- Your first concrete step toward a governance strategy you can actually implement
Why me
I genuinely care about this stuff
I’m not a consultant who parachutes in with a slide deck. This is what I spend every day thinking about. I built EventCatalog because I kept seeing teams struggle with the same problems and nothing existed to help them. It’s now used by companies all over the world. I wrote free educational content on event-driven architecture because I wanted to make these concepts more accessible — and it’s reached over 2 million people.
I do this because I’m genuinely passionate about helping teams get this right. I’ve spoken at NDC, GOTO, and AWS re:Invent — not to sell anything, but because the same problems keep coming up and I want to help people avoid them.
This workshop is everything I’ve learned, from years of building and from hundreds of honest conversations with teams in the thick of it. I’d love to share it with yours.
Now piloting
Let’s work together
I’m running this with a handful of teams right now. If any of this resonated, drop me a message — no pitch, just a conversation about where you are and whether this would help.
I’m offering a discounted rate for the first few teams who sign up. Once those spots are gone, they’re gone.
Contact me