An Introduction to Actors and Concurrency

Time: 14:30 - 16:20

Room: Branderij

Abstract

The world is concurrent, yet writing concurrent software is traditionally considered very troublesome. Given only threads and locks this view is wholly justified. This workshop gives an introduction to an alternative concurrency model: the actor model.

The actor model (used by Scala, Elixir, and Erlang) greatly simplifies concurrent programming. After some administrivia and a fast-paced introduction you will be tasked with constructing and navigating a Mars Exploration Rover.

Practical notes:

Michel Rijnders

Michel Rijnders (@mrijn): Programmer turned philosopher turned software engineer; main interests: functional programming and distributed systems. CTO at TruQu and organizer of Cross Functional AMS.

Matthijs Ooms

Matthijs Ooms (@matthijsooms) is senior software engineer at TTY. He is part of a team that build mobile apps for startups such as Searcle and Djuke.it, as well as backends for those mobile apps and websites such as Adformatie and Youp.nl. Co-organizer of Cross Functional AMS.