This is an overview of articles I wrote over the years, presently with a strong focus on building reactive systems with Akka. You can also see all articles.

Featured

• 10000 nodes and beyond with Akka Cluster and Rapid
• On pinning and and isolating CPU cores
• One step closer: exploiting locality in Akka Cluster based systems
• Akka Raspberry PI demos
• A new adaptive accrual failure detector for Akka

Rust

• Fearless concurrency with Rust, cats, and a few Raspberry PIs
• Building a cat litter box reminder with Rust
• Rust development for th Raspberry Pi on Apple Silicon

Tour of Temporal

• Part 1: Welcome to the Workflow
• Part 2: Performance (latency)

Tour of Akka Typed

• Part 1: Protocols and Behaviors
• Part 2: Message adapters, ask pattern and actor discovery
• Part 3: Supervision and signals
• Part 4: Event Sourcing
• Part 5: Cluster Sharding
• Part 6: Cluster Singleton and Routers

Tour of Akka Cluster

• Part 1: Akka Distributed Data
• Part 2: Eventual consistency, persistent actors, message delivery semantics
• Part 3: Cluster Sharding
• Part 4: Testing with the multi-node-testkit and a handful Raspberry PIs

Akka anti-patterns

Basics

• Shared mutable state
• Blocking
• Flat actor hierarchies / Mixing business logic and failure handling
• Race conditions
• Stateless actors
• Too many actors

Performance

• Logging the wrong way
• Being out of touch with the hardware
• Overusing ActorSelection
• Using Java Serialization

Network / Cluster

• Using remoting
• Trusting the network
• Always using the defaults (to be written)
• Using cluster without / with the wrong split-brain resolver (to be written)

Architecture / Design

• Not defining a protocol (to be written)
• Naming your application components after akka concepts
• Too many actor systems
• Blindly ignoring dead letters (to be written)

Akka

• Raspberry PI Akka Cluster LED strips
• Akka Cluster, Java and the Raspberry PI 3 Model B
• Akka Streams – What is NotUsed all about
• A handful Akka techniques

Scala

• Optimizing CI build times for Scala projects
• A quick tour of build tools in Scala
• A quick tour of JSON libraries in Scala
• A quick tour of relational database access with Scala
• 5 years of Scala and counting – debunking some myths about the language and its environment

Play Framework

• Reactive Golf or Iteratees and all that stuff in practice, part 1
• Reactive Golf or Iteratees and all that stuff in practice, part 2
• Reactive Golf or Iteratees and all that stuff in practice, part 3
• Tips & tricks for setting up a Play 2 project
• How to read the Play session from AngularJS
• CRUD trait for Slick models in the Play! framework
• Quickly open errors in your IDE when developing Play applications
• Multi-modular development with Play 2.1
• Activating logging in test mode in Play 2.0.x
• MongoDB-based Cache for Play 1.2.x and Play-Scala
• Play! Scala and JSON
• Selenium IDE plugin for the Play! framework

Reactive Database Access

• Part 1: Why Reactive, why “Async” & an introduction to Futures
• Part 2: Introduction to Actors
• Part 3: Using jOOQ with Scala, Futures and Actors

Misc

• Why I’m still using a MacBook Pro Late 2013 in 2019
• 2018: year in review
• 3 key findings from 10 years of home-office
• You got to hold the frame – Avoiding burnout or Lessons learned from six years as an independent consultant
• Reactive Play
• The reality of writing a technical book
• Initial thoughts on fatherhood
• Subsequent thoughts on fatherhood