Reactive Systems: Scala & Akka Programming

Martin Odersky, born September 5, 1958, has established himself as a leading figure in programming language design and development. After receiving his Ph.D. from ETH Zurich in 1989 under Niklaus Wirth's supervision, he held research positions at IBM and Yale University, where he developed his passion for functional programming. His career achievements include co-designing Java generics and developing the javac reference compiler that became the standard Java compiler. In 1999, he joined EPFL as a full professor, where he leads the programming research group. His most significant contribution is creating the Scala programming language, which began development in 2001 and was first released in 2003. Scala successfully unifies object-oriented and functional programming paradigms while maintaining complete interoperability with Java and .NET. In 2011, he co-founded Typesafe (renamed to Lightbend in 2016) to provide commercial support for Scala. His work has earned him numerous accolades, including being named an ACM Fellow in 2007 for his contributions to programming language design. He currently teaches several courses on Coursera, including Functional Programming Principles in Scala, Functional Program Design in Scala, and Programming Reactive Systems, while continuing to oversee Scala's development as both an academic and industrial programming language.

Julien Richard-Foy serves as the Director of Education at the Scala Center at EPFL, where he focuses on making advanced programming techniques accessible to a broader audience. He leads the development of educational content and initiatives that bridge the gap between academic research and industry practices in Scala programming. As the lead instructor for "Effective Programming in Scala," a comprehensive course with over 14,688 enrolled students, he teaches fundamental concepts, best practices, and real-world applications of the Scala language. His course, which maintains a remarkable 4.8/5 instructor rating, covers essential topics from business domain modeling to asynchronous computations and functional programming. Through his work at the Scala Center, he contributes to developing open-source tools and libraries while guiding the Scala community's growth and supporting newcomers to the ecosystem.

Roland Kuhn is the CTO and co-founder of Actyx, a company focused on developing software solutions for the Industry 4.0 sector. He is an influential figure in the programming community, known for authoring Reactive Design Patterns and co-authoring the Reactive Manifesto. Kuhn teaches the edX course Programming Reactive Systems and previously led the Akka project at Lightbend. He holds a Dr. rer. nat. in particle physics from the Technical University of Munich and has experience in the space industry. His work primarily revolves around distributed systems and edge computing, and he is dedicated to enhancing developer tools for these applications.

Konrad Malawski is a prominent academic affiliated with the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). He specializes in reactive programming and is a co-instructor of the course Programming Reactive Systems, which focuses on building scalable and resilient systems. Malawski's work contributes to the development of educational materials that enhance understanding of reactive design patterns and their practical applications in software engineering.