Kotlin + Akka Part 1: Hello Kotlin!

One of the many projects currently underway at Blockchain involves building a real-time platform that runs 24/7, capable of processing thousands of messages a second running, and with an API scaling to millions of requests. There are certainly many ways to approach…

Kotlin + Akka Part 2: Akka Hierarchy

In Part 1, we learned how to create a very simple Actor that prints out the String message it receives. An important concept to understand is that Actors are hierarchical, which means that any Actor created is a child of another Actor. This hierarchy gives Parent…

Kotlin + Akka Part 4: Scheduling

By now, you have played around with creating basic Actors and Actor hierarchies. It’s important to note that messages are delivered to Actors sequentially; this means no more than one dispatcher thread will ever call the Actor.

Kotlin + Akka Part 3: Dispatchers

The Akka Dispatcher defines the wiring of an Actor within an Actor System, such as how the Actor’s mailbox is configured and what implementation of the java.util.concurrent.ExecutorService to use.

Kotlin + Akka Part 5: Pub / Sub

The Akka Event Stream provides a pub/sub style API for actors. Actors subscribe to ‘channels’ on the Event Stream; the event is placed in the Actor’s mailbox if the subscription type matches the message.

Migrating to Kotlin on Android

It’s no secret that Kotlin is the new hotness for Android development, and for good reason. The language is more concise, handles NPEs safely, and offers features such as Higher Order Functions that have previously not been available on the platform, which is stuck on Java…

Migrating to Downloadable Fonts on Android

At Blockchain, we have many mobile users in bandwidth constrained environments such as developing countries. As such keeping the app small and lightweight is a priority for the Android team. Smaller app sizes increase both installs and conversion rates —…

Building Cryptocurrency Agnostic Components in My-Wallet-V3 and My-Wallet-V3-Frontend