<aside> ✍️ Author note • The main article (The Three Roads DDD Built) is a technical analysis. This piece is the personal backstory of the person who wrote it. • Migrating a large-scale C++ server to the JVM with Akka in Málaga, Spain. Encountering DDD for the first time in Perth, Australia. And then meeting both of them again, years later, when Korea finally turned to MSA. • What stayed with me longer than any specific technology was simply the experience of different engineering cultures and ways of working.
</aside>
<aside> 🌐 🌐 한국어 원문 → Akka와 DDD, 그리고 해외 개발 경험 이야기 — 작성자 회고
</aside>
Bridging two cities — a golden ribbon between Málaga sunset and Perth morning
Seeing DDD getting talked about again lately brought back memories of overseas projects from years ago.
The technical analysis lives in the main article; this piece is the personal context behind why I wrote it. Neither Akka nor DDD was something I first met in Korea.
The long nights of migrating a large C++ server into a JVM actor mesh
Back when Akka had just begun arriving in the Korean developer scene, I was on a project that needed to port a large-scale C++ server to Java and ship it overseas.
We were on Java 6~7 at the time. The Netty-based ecosystem was nowhere near as mature as today, and high-performance networking know-how on the JVM was still scarce. Just moving a workload from C++ to the JVM — the heavy concurrent-connection workload that C++ had been handling — was a real challenge in itself.
We worked with a partner from HP, brought in their latest hardware, and ran load tests over and over. The JVM was often the first thing that gave out. I can laugh about it now, but at the time I practically lived in the building until those load tests passed.
In that era, Akka.IO was a genuinely impressive piece of technology. It didn't give you raw C++ native performance, but it let you implement high concurrency and distributed processing at a realistic difficulty level. Problems that would normally require throwing many more servers at the wall could be solved without growing infrastructure that dramatically.
When the project finally wrapped and just before I flew home, the local team threw me a farewell party in Málaga, Spain — Picasso's hometown. I still remember sharing wine in the middle of that city, celebrating the close of the project.
A 1:1 meeting in Perth — when DDD felt like an expansion pack over Agile
I first ran into DDD on a dev team in Perth, Australia.
That team talked about DDD the way other teams talked about the Agile Manifesto. The team lead would even check on each person's DDD learning progress during 1:1s.