Month: December 2021

Watchdogging the Watchdog

Maybe one of the main differences between embedded software/PC programmers and server/backend programmers is their attitude toward system resets. A server programmer will try as hard as possible to avoid any sort of system reboot since this could make a bad situation even worse. They would always strive for graceful service degradation (i.e. the system would not provide its full or top-level service) whenever forced to take action against unexpected or failing conditions.

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Scala Job Interview – Reactive Programming

Here we are with the fourth installment in this Scala Job Interview series. The first was on general questions, the second on Scala language, and the third on functional programming.

Explain the actor model

In this case, the Actor Model has nothing to do with the Star System 🙂 I’m not sure where the term actor in “actor model” comes from. but, quite for sure, it has nothing to do with Hollywood, but more with the idea of something that “acts”, i.e. makes actions.

In fact, the Actor in the Actor Model is a processing entity that receives and reacts to messages. More precisely an Actor can only perform computation on the receipt of a message, when message processing is done, the actor just idly waits for the next incoming message.

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