Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Time: August 22, 2018 from 6pm to 7pm
Location: Chicago 1871
Street: 222 W. Merchandise Mart Plaza 12th Floor
City/Town: Chicago, IL
Website or Map: https://www.meetup.com/Google…
Event Type: google, developer, group, meetup
Organized By: Chicago GDG
Latest Activity: Aug 4, 2018
In a world where everyone and their mother uses web development, a quiet grassroots movement is bringing back native development. Whether you're brand-new to coding, or you just have framework fatigue, native desktop development can be used to create internal solutions in lieu of needless/repetitive work across any industry. TornadoFX is so easy and fun to pick up anyone could get into coding while simultaneously automating solutions in their everyday work.
TornadoFX is a great way to start learning Kotlin without being bogged down by servers or mobile or web development. You're not required to know JavaFX to start native application development, and there's a plethora of material out there.
Come join us in creating a scheduling application for the neighborhood cat-sitter, who needs to keep track feeding up to 8 cats on any given day. Bring a laptop if you can!
Codetown is a social network. It's got blogs, forums, groups, personal pages and more! You might think of Codetown as a funky camper van with lots of compartments for your stuff and a great multimedia system, too! Best of all, Codetown has room for all of your friends.
Created by Michael Levin Dec 18, 2008 at 6:56pm. Last updated by Michael Levin May 4, 2018.
Check out the Codetown Jobs group.

At QCon London 2016, engineers from Spotify presented how the company accelerates internal tool development using its internal developer platform and AI-assisted workflows.
By Daniel Dominguez
Jabez Eliezer Manuel, Senior Principal Engineer at Booking.com, presented “Behind Booking.com's AI Evolution: The Unpolished Story” at QCon London 2026. Manuel discussed how Booking.com has evolved over the past 20 years and the challenges they faced on their journey to incorporate AI.
By Michael Redlich
Google has open sourced CEL-expr-python, a Python implementation of the Common Expression Language (CEL), a non-Turing complete embedded policy and expression language designed for simplicity, speed, safety, and portability.
By Sergio De Simone
Form3 runs UK bank payments across three clouds simultaneously. At QCon London, their engineers explained how they built their custom Kubernetes operators, cross-cloud DNS tricks, and distributed databases, and what happened when they tried to sell them in America. Spoiler: US customers wanted East/West failover, not triple-active multi-cloud.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
At QCon London 2026, Yinka Omole, Lead Software Engineer at Personio, presented a session exploring a recurring dilemma engineers face, whether to spend time mastering the newest technologies and frameworks or to invest in deeper, foundational problems that may appear less exciting but deliver long-term value.
By Daniel Dominguez
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
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