Roland Kuhn

Dr. Roland Kuhn studied physics at the Technische Universität München and obtained a doctorate with a dissertation on measurements of the gluon spin structure of the nucleon at a high-energy particle physics experiment at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland). This entailed usage and implementation of large computing clusters and fast data processing networks, which laid the foundation for his thorough understanding of distributed computing. Afterward, he worked for four years at the German space operations center, building control centers and ground infrastructure for military satellite missions, before joining the Akka team at Lightbend (then called Typesafe), which he led from November 2012 to March 2016. During this time he co-taught the course Principles of Reactive Programming on the Coursera platform together with Martin Odersky and Erik Meijer, a course that was visited by more than 120,000 students. Together with Jonas Bonér, he authored the first version of the Reactive Manifesto, published in June 2013. Currently, Roland is CTO of Actyx, a Munich-based company he cofounded, bringing the benefits of modern Reactive systems to small and midsize manufacturing enterprises across Europe.

books by Roland Kuhn

Reactive Design Patterns

  • February 2017
  • ISBN 9781617291807
  • 392 pages
  • printed in black & white
  • Available translations: Korean, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese

Reactive Design Patterns presents the principles, patterns, and best practices of Reactive application design. You'll learn how to keep one slow component from bogging down others with the Circuit Breaker pattern, how to shepherd a many-staged transaction to completion with the Saga pattern, how to divide datasets by Sharding, and more. You'll even see how to keep your source code readable and the system testable despite many potential interactions and points of failure.