Learning Path: Akka: Building Applications and Microservices

First, the course is outdated in 2021. The pace in the first part is sometimes to fast so I had to stop the video several times to read the code. The second part quality is awful compared to the first one and it repeats some information from the first part.

I think it is very useful to have such a high-level overview of complete Akka documentation. Yet at times I find myself a bit disappointed that presenter skips explanations of details of the code and jumps to the next slide - usually sbt run console - only to proclaim "Excellent ! Great! Lets' move on". I am glad it is all excellent and great, but I'd expect to get a bit more than a flash of quick-typed code for a few seconds. I'd like to get better understanding of the code before agreeing it is all excellent and great. I sure can dig Akka documentation on my own, but isn't the point of the course to explain certain key details rather than merely mentioning them ?

This course feels like a very generic and superficial overview of Akka functionality. It doesn't go into any detail about the motivation or background of any of Akka's design decisions, theory, or what factors to consider when writing a real system. The lack of programming exercises means real skill and competency is not developed or tested. For anyone wanting to learn Akka properly, I would much rather recommend the Programming Reactive Systems course in edx (made in collaboration with Lightbend)

The overall content was pretty good and I've found it also well presented (except for the below). I liked the sheer breadth of the topics covered but consider they are all more beginner-oriented. The course is best for someone completely new to Akka. I liked that it covers almost all modules: actors, streams, http, remoting, clustering, sharding, persistence. I also liked some best practices at the end, though these could be extended. There are some issues with the videos, however: The voice-over lady seems like she has no idea what she is talking about, she is just reading the content like a machine. This makes the video very difficult to follow, I had to pause frequently to think about the concepts and make my own opinion. The second section is like the direct opposite to the first: the first lady is over-enthusiastic, while the second presenter is almost sleep-inducing. Still, I preferred the second presenter, since it was clear in his voice that he understands the concept and this is much easier to follow. Furthermore, code sections are good content-wise but they all happen so fast that sometimes I even had trouble hitting the pause button before the code disappeared and the screen changed from IDE to console.​ Finally, what really bothered me the most during the videos is the omnipresent padding with useless information. Every video starts with 1) welcome message, 2) what we've seen in the previous video, 3) what we will discuss in this video, and ends with 4) summary of what we've just seen, 5) what we will see in the next video. If you look at this more closely, number 2) of video 6 is an exact same duplicate of number 4) of video 5. Similarily, number 3) of video 6 is a duplicate of number 5) of video 5. And this keeps repeating for all videos. Why this bothers me is that it is very difficult to keep attention when you're so frequently interrupted with something that gives you no new information whatsoever. I really recommend skipping these parts altogether, otherwise you will find yourselves drifting out every now and then.