Hugh McKee is a developer advocate at Lightbend. He has had a long career building applications that evolved slowly, that inefficiently utilized their infrastructure, and that was brittle and prone to failure. That all changed when we started building reactive, asynchronous, actor-based systems. This radically new way of building applications rocked his world. As an added benefit, building application systems became way more fun than it had ever been. Now he is focused on helping others to discover the significant advantages and joys of building responsive, resilient, elastic, message-driven applications.