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.
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.
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