The Reactive Manifesto and React 2014 have officially launched the reactive journey promising to take us to new worlds that have an applications nirvana which is event-driven, scalable, resilient and responsive! The manifesto presents a well-articulated challenge to how most applications are built today, and at the very least, already has a strong hold foothold in the application space. The Alpha Geeks are already landing on their chosen reactive world - Rx, Clojure Async, FRP, Erlang, Akka, Event Sourcing, Streaming, etc. - speaking in different dialects.

Will we need a babble fish or is this truly a better way? This talk is a brief pragmatic journey in time through reactive epoch from its origins in flow and reactive programming to a not so distant speculative future. Along the way we will attempt to answer the important pragmatic questions: What is it? What is or isn't it good for? How much is a free reactive lunch? How reactive should our applications be? How reactive should I be?