Panel at wroclove.rb 2023 framed as 'something between a discussion and a confrontation'. Moderator Andrzej Krzywda with panelists Scott Bellware and Nathan Ladd (behind Eventide / MessageDB) and Paweł Pacana (rails_event_store / Arkency). Opens with a show of hands — only a minority of the audience uses event sourcing. Topics: Scott's critique of DDD as a celebrity-geek cult that subjugates developers with over-elaborate patterns and hijacks pre-existing vocabulary (e.g. 'aggregate' vs the earlier 'partition', 'fixture' hijacked by Rails); whether Arkency and Eventide would write similar code given the same requirements (probably yes, modulo labeling); why aggregates should not emit events (mistaken turn of a non-code design concept into a code pattern); the immediate benefit of event-driven architecture is productivity via loose coupling and cohesion at the 'subatomic' level, and event sourcing is merely a side effect of pub/sub; Scott/Nathan's Brightworks team runs ~400 repos for 15 developers on the Neuron venture-capital product; Rails is used as a web server that they leave as fast as possible by recording commands on a message queue; test setup code as the true quality signal (tests needing inventory data to test pricing reveals hidden Active Record coupling, which factory_bot conceals); microservices as a misunderstood term — the 'micro' originally meant 'no IBM/Microsoft/Oracle', not 'HTTP everywhere'; web services / CORBA / SOAP were all the same failure mode reinvented; the preferred term is 'autonomous components' and both teams actually use one shared database with multiple schemas; ORMs are the 'worm with no separation between organs'; closing agreement that the real battle is Rails Way vs Design Way and that Eventide should not be crammed into legacy apps.