Manuel Bernhardt

A bit over two years ago, I wrote about my initial thoughts on fatherhood a bit after our daughter was born.

So you’ve just learned Akka and are tremendously excited.

Akka uses the The Φ Accrual Failure Detector for failure detection, which is to say for answering the question of whether a node is alive or not.

One anti-pattern I’ve observed in networked Akka applications is a tendency to forget that it is, well, networked and to treat the network as a friendly place.

Want to help your team in getting started with building distributed reactive applications using Akka?

Senior developer using Akka remoting directly to build a special type of cluster Whilst I have always successfully discouraged my clients from using Akka Remoting in their application, I often get questions regarding remoting while talking about anti-patt…

Lagom is a framework for building reactive microservices in Scala or Java with an emphasis on developer productivity.

Akka Streams is a powerful implementation on top of the Reactive Streams SPI for non-blocking asynchronous communication with back-pressure on the JVM.

This is probably one of the most frequent (and dangerous) anti-patterns when it comes to working with Akka.

There’s a scene in the 1987 classic movie Dirty Dancing in which Johnny (Patrick Swayze) explains the concept of dancing space to Baby (Jennifer Grey).

I recently got myself a new desktop computer with nice and fast hardware (more about this in another post) and am setting up Ubuntu Gnome on it.

This is a now page that tells you what I am focusing on at this point in my life.

I’m a polyglot software engineer and trainer working as an independent consultant.

Want to help your team in getting started with building distributed reactive applications using Akka?

Choosing Akka as a tool is often - if not always - driven by the need for good performance.

Want to help your team to get up to speed with the core concepts of Akka and the Actor model, enabling them to build production-ready Akka applications?

Want to help your team to get started with Scala faster and to share the same basic knowledge about the language and the functional programming concepts?

Do you want to help your team start using Akka and the actor model quickly to create operational applications?

Update: removed rogue toString call in the second code example, since it was unnecessary (and harmful).

Admittedly I’ve seen this one in use only one time, but it was one time too many.

The actor model makes it possible to build highly-concurrent applications through the notion that actors obey the actor send rule and the actor subsequent processing rule, hence creating a single-threaded environment inside of an actor.

Flat actor hierarchy.

When I work with clients on designing actor systems there are a few anti-patterns that seem to make it into initial, non-reviewed designs no matter what.

Two days ago I received my copies of Reactive Web Applications.

Everyone is talking about microservices.

I recently built an architecture prototype for DIMOCO aiming at answering roughly the following questions: what does it entail to run an Akka cluster, how fast can new nodes join, how manageable is such a cluster?

Reactive Web Applications Reactive Web Applications I decided to put the know-how I’ve collected over the years to good use by writing a book that will help others get started with reactive web applications.

If there is one thing you need to know when it comes to enhancing your productivity when working with the Play Framework it’s the following tip because it will save you a lot of time during development.

Today I set out to the task of upgrading a set of views crafted with the React library.

I started using Scala 5 years ago instead of Java after starting (but never quite finishing) to read the first edition of Programming in Scala.

Update (18.11.2015): added spray-json-shapeless library Update (06.11.15): added circe library Some time ago I wrote a post on relational database access in Scala since I was looking for a library and there were many of them available, making it hard to m…

Our daughter Valérie was born two three weeks ago.

As a child (I think I was around 6 at that time), I wanted to become an inventor, much like Gyro Gearloose.

TL;DR: Play applications are not automagically performant.

I’ll start by saying that this is not a rant, but rather a cry of despair that I’m repeating and that slowly - but steadily - seems to come to consciousness in our industry, like this one.

I’ve been using Akka for 3 years in a variety of projects and by now, I have a hard time imagining to deal with some of the parts of my work without it.

Update: Added Squeryl, thanks to @JoeZulli for the heads-up Update 2: Added link to latest Squeryl release for Scala 2.10 and 2.9.2 I recently started working with relational databases again from within Scala, after a while in JSON-land (mostly MongoDB and

Two weeks ago, I went to speak about Scala at the Java2Days conference in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Here are the slides from my talk at Devoxx 2013 in Antwerp: https://speakerdeck.com/manuelbernhardt/tips-and-tricks-for-setting-up-a-play-2-project Devoxx was great, as always!

In part 1 and 2 we’ve seen how to build a completely reactive chain to fetch a large stream of data from a REST API, transform it on the fly and send it over to indexing to ElasticSearch.

A bit late, but nonetheless: my slides from the Java Klassentreffen 2013 in Vienna and Linz.

Last week, we saw how to get data from a REST API and modify it to our liking in order to send it off for indexing to ElasticSearch.

I’m currently working on a project that involves synchronizing large amounts of data from backend systems for the purpose of making it searchable.

Three weeks ago, one of our cats set its mind to beat its long-distance jumping record on my desk, accross my laptop.

If you happen to work, like me, on a project that makes use of both the Play framework and AngularJS, you may at some point need to read some data from the Play session in your AngularJS application.

Last week, I started working with AngularJS for a real-world project - I had played with Angular before, mainly to see how it differs from KnockoutJS which I had been using intensively before.

Slick is a powerful library for functional database access, leveraging Scala language features such as implicit conversions and macro’s to allow type-safe interaction with databases.

A few weeks ago, James Ward announced a new Google Chrome extension (and SBT plugin) to automatically refresh Play framework applications during development in the browser.

On OS X, when you press the Exposé keys (F9, F10, F11) with Shift as a modifier, you get the animation shown much, much slower.

Today I wrote my first useful Android app, which shows the bus connections from the bus stop next to our flat to the subway line (I didn’t say it was going to be useful for you).