In this session I will give an introduction to the actor model, and why it can make your life easier when writing reactive, scalable and distributed systems. We will build a backend using ASP.NET Core and Akka.NET, demonstrating scaling out, location transparency and self healing in the event of errors (fail and fail hard). We will also deploy actors running under Mono on a small farm of Raspberry Pis as part of our clustered actor system. Finally we will build a simple front end with React+Redux, write a custom middleware for SignalR/Server Sent Events (to be decided), and connect it to our actor model running on the server. The front end will update itself in near real time as a direct result of messages from the actor system.