Scale By The Bay 2020: Salar Rahmanian, Acting Lessons for Scala Engineers with Akka and ZIO

ai.bythebay.io Nov 2025, Oakland, full-stack AI conference Actors are a cornerstone of modern concurrent and distributed systems, propelling both Erlang and Scala to early success. Exposing a model that doesn’t require locks, and which doesn’t block threads, actors have helped developers build software without worrying about deadlocks, thread management, and other woes of modern software development. In this presentation, Salar Rahmanian will provide an introduction to actors, akka, zio-actors and show you how modern functional effect systems like ZIO allow a reimagining of the actor paradigm, in ways that increase type safety, allow coordination of state changes across multiple actors, and still preserve the benefits that brought developers to the actor paradigm. Salar Rahmanian Collective Health Software Engineer San Francisco Bay Area Websitehttps://softinio.com/ I have been developing software since the age of eleven and have over 20 years of commercial experience. My passion and expertise is focused on functional programming and building concurrent and distributed systems using Scala. I am a core developer for the ZIO Scala Library for asynchronous and concurrent programming.