ArchitectureQuickie15min
Moving from blocking calls to Event-Driven Architecture
This talk shares how an engineering team modernized a legacy PHP monolith by introducing event-driven architecture without a full rewrite. It covers practical patterns, pitfalls avoided, and lessons on blending synchronous and asynchronous systems to decouple components, extend functionality, and evolve sustainably instead of rebuilding from scratch.
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Christos PsychogyiosEpignosis
Penelope NastouEpignosis
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Saturday, April 25, 10:35-10:50
MC 2
You've heard the promises: "Just rewrite it." "Go full microservices." "Start from scratch." We heard them too. And then we looked at our monolith, battle-scarred, deeply entangled, and yet... still standing. Still serving millions of requests. Still paying the bills. So we asked a different question: what if we don't kill it? This talk is the story of how we introduced event-driven architecture into a living, breathing PHP monolith without burning it to the ground. We'll walk through the traps we avoided, the patterns we embraced, and the moment we realized that sync and async aren't enemies, they're collaborators. You'll see how we decoupled without dismantling, and gave new features a modern backbone without touching the old ones. If you've ever stared at a monolith and felt the pressure to "just rewrite it," this talk might save you a year of your life.
Christos Psychogyios
Christos Psychogyios is a Principal Software Engineer and Lead Engineer of TalentLMS at Epignosis. He is an AWS Certified Engineer with over 13 years of experience in designing scalable, cloud-native systems and guiding engineering teams toward technical excellence.
His expertise lies in backend architecture, where he has led the evolution of large-scale platforms from monolithic applications to distributed microservices. He focus on Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) using technologies Amazon services, enabling resilient and loosely coupled systems that scale effectively. His knowledge is rooted in software engineering principles, extending through design patterns, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and Test-Driven Development (TDD) to deliver maintainable and business-aligned architectures.
He is passionate about Event-Driven Architecture, seeing it not just as a technical pattern but as a mindset for building adaptable and autonomous systems. He actively promote collaborative modeling practices like Event Storming to help teams uncover domain insights, align on shared understanding, and design solutions that truly reflect business behavior. As a mentor, he has helped engineers grow their careers, fostering a culture of trust, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
His expertise lies in backend architecture, where he has led the evolution of large-scale platforms from monolithic applications to distributed microservices. He focus on Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) using technologies Amazon services, enabling resilient and loosely coupled systems that scale effectively. His knowledge is rooted in software engineering principles, extending through design patterns, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), and Test-Driven Development (TDD) to deliver maintainable and business-aligned architectures.
He is passionate about Event-Driven Architecture, seeing it not just as a technical pattern but as a mindset for building adaptable and autonomous systems. He actively promote collaborative modeling practices like Event Storming to help teams uncover domain insights, align on shared understanding, and design solutions that truly reflect business behavior. As a mentor, he has helped engineers grow their careers, fostering a culture of trust, curiosity, and continuous improvement.
Penelope Nastou
Penelope Nastou is a Senior Software Engineer at Epignosis, where she works on the Event-Driven Architecture team building the platforms and tooling that help engineering teams adopt asynchronous systems without losing their sanity. Her work sits at the intersection of platform engineering and distributed systems, focusing on making events, workflows, and developer tooling practical for real teams. She works mainly with AWS, TypeScript, and PHP, and is particularly interested in Domain-Driven Design and CI/CD automation that improves the everyday developer experience. When not thinking about distributed systems, she's usually reading, experimenting with synthesizers, or planning her next trip.
