Think concurrency differently.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably heard about Akka, Pekko or the actor model. It’s one of the most powerful abstractions of concurrent programming we’ve had, even though it’s not new. No more creating threads, no more locking, double-locking, deadlocks and concurrency problems. With actors, you can write heavily concurrent and distributed systems quickly, without the usual headaches. As such, massively parallel and distributed backends all over the place are powered by Akka.

This course is for the Scala developer willing to tap into the actor model and a new way of thinking parallel and distributed code.

The course fully supports Akka (from Lightbend) as well as Pekko, the open-source version of Akka.

Main benefits of Akka or Pekko

Write massively parallel and distributed applications more quickly
Add resilience and fault tolerance to your applications without any great fuss
Write code with an easy mental model you can relate to
Easily test parallel apps, which are notoriously hard to test

Write parallel code with actors instead of threads and locks

Write parallel code with actors instead of threads and locks
Manage actors in hierarchies
Adopt the “let it crash” philosophy with your applications
Configure Akka or Pekko for anything
Test concurrent applications with actors
Parallelize and delegate tasks to actors
Use the best practices in working with the actor model
Plus some extra perks:
- You’ll have access to the entire code I write on camera (all 2200+ lines of it)
- You’ll be invited to our private Slack room where I’ll share latest updates, discounts, talks, conferences, and recruitment opportunities
- You’ll have access to the takeaway slides

Skills you’ll get:

Work with actors instead of threads
- Understand the thread model limitations
- Adopt a new mindset with actors as the fundamental resource
- Learn how actors are closest to the original object-oriented ideal
- Send and receive messages
- Change actor behavior dynamically
- Spawn child actors and actor hierarchies
- Learn about system guardians
- Log messages for easier debugging
- Learn how to configure an Akka/Pekko application in 5 different ways
Test Akka applications
- Use TestKit and assertions
- Use TestProbes
- Write timed assertions
- Intercept actor logs to verify correct functionality
Achieve fault-tolerance in parallel applications
- Start and stop actors programmatically and via message passing
- Manage actor lifecycle
- Create supervisor strategies to recover from failure
- Use the Backoff Supervisor pattern to access an external resource that failed
Deeply understand and use the Akka or Pekko infrastructure
- Schedule messages
- Manage timeouts
- Parallelize and distribute tasks to workers with Routers
- Use custom dispatchers for underlying thread management
- Use custom mailboxes to process messages on your own terms
Learn advanced techniques
- stash messages for later use
- use the ask pattern for quick request-response interactions without any fuss
- use the pipe pattern for integration with external services
- all with live runnable examples and practiced with exercises.

All with live runnable examples and practiced with exercises.

Plus some extra perks:

You’ll have access to the entire code I write on camera (1800+ LOC)
You’ll be invited to our private Slack room where I’ll share latest updates, discounts, talks, conferences, and recruitment opportunities
You’ll have access to the takeaway slides

Daniel Ciocîrlan

I'm a software engineer and the founder of Rock the JVM.

I'm a software engineer and the founder of Rock the JVM. I started the Rock the JVM project out of love for Scala and the technologies it powers - they are all amazing tools and I want to share as much of my experience with them as I can.

As of February 2024, I've taught Java, Scala, Kotlin and related tech (e.g. Cats, ZIO, Spark) to 100000+ students at various levels and I've held live training sessions for some of the best companies in the industry, including Adobe and Apple. I've also taught university students who now work at Google and Facebook (among others), I've held Hour of Code for 7-year-olds and I've taught more than 35000 kids to code.

I have a Master's Degree in Computer Science and I wrote my Bachelor and Master theses on Quantum Computation. Before starting to learn programming, I won medals at international Physics competitions.