I like to describe a distributed actor as a unit of state with single-threaded compute on top, available to every app in the distributed system. It’s a surprisingly compact definition for a programming model that can feel counter-intuitive if you haven’t run into it before.Most developers, even experienced ones, haven’t. I certainly hadn’t. And even when I was working full-time on Dapr—an open-source project that includes a distributed actors building block—it still took me months to really “get” actors. However, a sense of appreciation quickly followed, and eventually I fell in love with them as a pattern for building distributed systems.