When I write about Akka.NET and the actor model, this is not what I mean:

I’m probably going to abuse this stupid joke in every 100-level blog post and video where I introduce the concept of Actors, so please bear with me.

In all seriousness, an actor is a broad concept. Here’s my layman’s definition of the actor model:

An “actor” is really just an analog for human participants in a system. Actors communicate with each other just like how humans do, by exchanging messages. Actors, like humans, can do work between messages.

Think of something like a call center, where hundreds of customers might call a 1-800 number and have concurrent conversations with one of many possible customer service agents.

It’s been a massive year for Akka.NET and I want to highlight some of the amazing contributions that have been made to that project. I’m writing this post from my perspective, but it’s not about me.

This month marks the one-year anniversary of Akka.NET and it has been a massive year for Akka.NET. In December of 2013, Roger Alsing and I had never met and we were both working on our own actor framework implementations in .NET.

Before It Was Akka.NET…

My startup at the time, MarkedUp Analytics, was just starting its R&D efforts to begin developing its real-time marketing automation product on top of our existing in-app analytics product. We knew we needed the Actor model and reliable socket networking software to make the product meet its business requirements, and so I began work on two projects in parallel:

• Hyperion, a .NET port of the Akka actor framework in Scala and
• Helios, a port of the Netty Java socket server framework that powers all of Akka’s remoting capabilities.

I broke ground on Helios first, right around Thanskgiving 2013. By Christmas Eve I also had a working prototype of Hyperion, who’s actor model implementation was largely powered by the TPL Dataflow library. One weekend in late January, as I was resuming work on Hyperion after taking a break since Christmas, I came across a blog post some guy named Roger Alsing wrote about his port of Akka Actors to .NET.

I cared way more about getting MarkedUp’s in-app marketing product shipped than I did creating my own Actor framework, so I did what anyone in my position would do: furiously port one of...