4 HN users recommended this talk4 months2016–2022score 5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN developers recommend it as the talk that changed how they model systems, and as a clear intro to event sourcing's motivations.
Greg Young's Code on the Beach 2014 talk on CQRS and event sourcing. He argues mature domains are built on facts that occurred rather than current state, and covers the business and technical benefits.
“forever changed how I think about modeling systems, preserving history” (HN, 2022)
The following talk about event sourcing (not listed in the article)•, really made an impact on me: Event Sourcing - Greg Young [this video] •: Not that I really expected it to be I guess.
Not about dev tools per se, but this talk by Greg Young on event sourcing & CQRS forever changed how I think about modeling systems, preserving history, and supporting multiple read models/versioning. Really clear walkthrough of the types of problems that benefit from an event sourced system, how event sourcing addresses them, and exploration of new use cases it enables. [this video]
Clear walkthrough of problems event sourcing solves and new use cases.
I agree with you it's tough to sell CQRS, it's like trying to explain to someone that their business should use a database in one line. For me event-sourcing is a historical layer below your existing database that allows you to replay the sequence of events that got your database to its current state. If I had to businessify it, maybe it would be 'Wolkenkit is a framework that allows you to save and replay your entire business's history so you never miss a key insight again.' From a technical perspective, engineers can focus on the product and organically build and destroy the data structures around a changing business instead of trying to find the perfect data-structures that will inevitably be incorrect as the business grows and evolves. You get regression tests for free, and you get backups for free which may be nice-to-haves when the business is small, but absolute requirements once you have real customers paying real money. Not sure how I would squeeze that in an elevator pitch though. Greg Young's presentation on event-sourcing is pretty great, you may find some inspiration there: [this video]
Greg Young explains event sourcing, useful for pitching it.
Greg Young also cautions "Do not tell me you've built an event sourced system"* (or something along those lines) meaning that you should be careful to apply the pattern only to the part(s) of the system that makes sense (due to the increased complexity of ES) * I think it's in this talk [this video]
Greg Young cautions about applying event sourcing only where it fits.
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
5 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Read more
Citations, criticism and jokes