About six months ago, I started to see some really great blog posts come from a person named Colin Breck, who I’ve since had the pleasure of getting to know better. Colin is an experienced Akka developer who recently spoke at QCon London about using Quality Views to combat technical debt, and followed up with a podcast with InfoQ: https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/tesla-colin-breck

Colin has spent a lot of time writing on http://blog.colinbreck.com to help developers understand the different modules in the overall Akka toolkit, with a special focus on how to use Akka Actors and Akka Streams in conjunction for the greatest benefit. So I wanted to invite Colin to this Lightbend Podcast to go into more detail on this particular aspect of building resilient, distributed, back-pressured streaming applications with Akka. Enjoy!

Integrating Akka Streams with Akka Actors In Cloud-Based Reactive Systems (with Colin Breck)

Lightbend (@Lightbend) is leading the enterprise transformation toward real-time, cloud-native applications. Lightbend Platform provides scalable, high-performance microservices frameworks and streaming engines for building data-centric systems that are optimized to run on cloud-native infrastructure. The most admired brands around the globe are transforming their businesses with Lightbend, engaging billions of users every day through software that is changing the world. For more information, visit www.lightbend.com.

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Today's guest is Leon Stigter, Principal Product Manager for Akka Serverless. We discuss the origins and promises of serverless, some of the limitations of stateless functions for serverless, why data-centric serverless applications need more data access patterns to get the job done, how Akka Serverless democratizes access to the features and patterns developers need to be successful, and more.

How can we democratize complex data access patterns for serverless?

Our guests Kiki Carter, Lead Developer Experience Engineer, and Hugh McKee, Developer Advocate for Akka Platform, return to the show after our last podcast, where we discussed whether it is worth it to manage Kubernetes (and other cloud native technologies and infrastructure) yourself, or use a managed solution. This naturally led to the topic of what developers actually want out of the technologies they use, and what are the truly important parts of the user experience.

What Does Developer Productivity Mean in the Serverless Era?

Today we sit down with Christopher Hunt (Twitter: @huntchr), former Lightbender and now the founder/CTO of an Australian IoT startup called Titan Class. Commissioned by Cisco Systems, Titan Class makes Farmify, a field-based digital twin IoT solution designed using Akka Streams that gathers and analyzes various sensor metrics to enable intelligent farming. 

Learn more here:

https://www.titanclass.com.au/
https://www.farmify.com.au/

How Agricultural IoT Helps Farmers Get Data Out Of Hard To Reach Places

In this podcast, our special guest is Alison Gianotto, aka [at]snipeyhead on Twitter. Alison is the CEO and founder of Grokability, the company behind Snipe-IT, which is a free as well as hosted solution for managing the where, when, and what of a company’s physical assets. 

Today we’re talking about going from an open source hobby to a hosted platform with a global client base and increasing revenues, and hopefully touch on other topics like using social networks for business, the implications of serverless as an industry trend, and questions we’re tired of answering repeatedly. 

Note: This discussion includes some NSFW language so please throw those headphones on! :-) 

Here are the relevant links to subjects we discussed:

- https://grokstar.dev/business/2021/06/feel-the-churn-but-preferably-not/
- https://grokstar.dev/business/2020/12/the-awkwardness-of-branding-and-naming-things-in-open-source-saas/
- https://grokstar.dev/business/2017/08/choosing-a-model-for-your-open-source-business/
- https://goodforms.com

From OSS Hobby To $1m+ Hosted Platform with Snipe-IT

In this Lightbend podcast with Kiki Carter, Lead Developer Experience Engineer, and Hugh McKee, Developer Advocate for Akka Platform, we take a look at work.

Namely, how much time should software engineers give to working on something that we don’t like, aren’t especially good at, or would otherwise avoid in favor of other more interesting topics? 

Industry trends indicate that the less we developers need to mess with Kubernetes and other cloud based entities like databases and load balancers, the better off we all are. Today we’ll talk about why developers feel this way, what technologies are out there to help, and how to think about what we might outsource in terms of operations, deployment and management of our cloud-based systems.

Integrating Akka Streams with Akka Actors In Cloud-Based Reactive Systems (with Colin Breck)

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