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.

Lyft details a new pickup experience to improve reliability in gated communities, where 25–30% of rides face routing and access challenges. The system uses mapping signals, boundary detection, and routing improvements to reduce cancellations and coordination overhead between riders and drivers, highlighting how real-world constraints drive evolution in geospatial systems.
By Leela Kumili
When a platform started with total developer autonomy, teams felt overwhelmed and ended up solving the same problems in completely different ways. The company shifted to enablement over support, working together with teams intensively, and helping teams feel confident and capable, turning the right way into being the easiest way.
By Ben Linders
OpenAI's GPT-5.5, GPT-5.4, and Codex are now generally available on Amazon Bedrock, one month after OpenAI revised its exclusive Azure arrangement. Pricing matches OpenAI's direct rates with usage counting toward AWS commitments. Codex shifts to pay-per-token billing with no seat fees. GPT-5.4 is the first OpenAI model available in AWS GovCloud.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Cindy Zhang discusses the evolution of XDS, a unified UI system powering 10,000+ internal tools. She shares actionable insights for architects and engineering leaders on managing large-scale community contributions, executing safe monorepo refactors using JS AST and AI codemods, mitigating breaking changes via feature flags, and expanding UI libraries into full-stack platform systems.
By Cindy Zhang
Recently open-sourced by Microsoft, pg_durable is a PostgreSQL extension that enables durable workflows to run natively inside the database, eliminating the need for external orchestration systems.
By Sergio De Simone
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