The actor model is one of those computer science inventions from the 1970s that very few programmers have given notice. I was just like that myself too, until I quit my job at Microsoft and started my first venture-backed startup company at the age of 26.

We had no problem building super scalable web applications, client SDKs, and all sorts of other issues - but then we ran into trouble: we needed to do build a system that could support 1m+ concurrent users with an SLA of under 1 second per user per operation. None of our expertise with databases, caches, or .NET programming was sufficient to solve this problem - we had to find a new paradigm altogether.

Enter the actor model, whose introduction and adoption has permanently changed the arc of my career - leading to the creation of Akka.NET and tens of thousands of other people discovering it too.

In this talk we are going to dive into how leveraging actors allows you to look at problems differently and create solutions that were totally unworkable in CRUD-world. We'll use some examples that are both small and large-scale. If you stick with us, you'll become a much more powerful programmer and architect than you were before.

I've given variations of this talk before starting back in 2015, most notably at .NET Fringe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2UfXbL-Mr8

But it has been a very long time and I've gone on to do 10 years of helping companies like Apple, Bank of America, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, ING, and others build actor systems since then. So the talk's girded with many more experiences and samples now - and I have not given it in many years.

Audience is software developers and architects.