Actor model programming in Scala
When: October 19, 2026, 10:45 - 12:30
Where: Aula-Lecture Hall D (20.02.460)
In this guest lecture of CSE2520 (Big Data Processing), Maciej Gorywoda will talk about actor model programming in Scala.
Abstract: This lecture will be a bit unusual. The Actor model rests on deceptively simple foundations. Foundations that can be spelled out in a matter of minutes. But we can then spend weeks and months building on top of them: enriching them, deriving conclusions, and combining those conclusions to produce new value. That is what I would like to do: take you on a journey of implementing an Actor model from scratch. I assume you know Scala syntax and are familiar with event streams, so we will start from there. During those ninety minutes, we will discuss all the important (and some not-so-important) building blocks of a mature Actor system. It is not a lot of time, I admit, so there will be no live coding; instead, expect plenty of infographics and some Scala code on the slides.
Bio: Maciej Gorywoda is a Product Marketing Manager in the IntelliJ Scala team at JetBrains. He graduated from Warsaw University of Technology in 2005 with an MSc in artificial neural networks. He worked as a video game AI expert, a web tools and Android developer, and since two and a half years ago a person who writes and talks publicly about features of IntelliJ Idea with the Scala Plugin. In 2024, he became a Scala Ambassador.
