About the Authors

Dr. Roland Kuhn studied physics at the Technische Universität München and obtained a doctorate with a dissertation on measurements of the gluon spin structure of the nucleon at a high-energy particle physics experiment at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). This entailed usage and implementation of large computing clusters and fast data processing networks, which laid the foundation for his thorough understanding of distributed computing. Afterward, he worked for four years at the German space operations center, building control centers and ground infrastructure for military satellite missions, before joining the Akka team at Lightbend (then called Typesafe), which he led from November 2012 to March 2016. During this time he co-taught the course Principles of Reactive Programming on the Coursera platform together with Martin Odersky and Erik Meijer, a course that was visited by more than 120,000 students. Together with Jonas Bonér, he authored the first version of the Reactive Manifesto, published in June 2013. Currently, Roland is CTO of Actyx, a Munich-based company he cofounded, bringing the benefits of modern Reactive systems to small and midsize manufacturing enterprises across Europe.

Brian Hanafee received his BS in EECS from the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Principal Systems Architect at Wells Fargo Bank, where he designs internet banking and payment systems and is a consistent advocate for raising the technology bar. Previously he was with Oracle, working on new and emerging products and systems for interactive television and for text processing. He sent his first email from a moving vehicle in 1994. Prior to that, Brian was an Associate at Booz, Allen & Hamilton and at Advanced Decision Systems, where he applied AI techniques to military planning systems. He also wrote software for one of the first ejection-safe helmet-mounted display systems.

Jamie Allen is the Director of Engineering for the UCP project at Starbucks, an effort to redefine the digital experience for every customer across all of our operating models and locations. He is the author of Effective Akka (O’Reilly, 2013), and previously worked with Roland and Jonas at Typesafe/Lightbend for over four years. Jamie has been a Scala and actor developer since 2008, and has worked with numerous clients around the world to help them understand and adopt Reactive application approaches.