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.

Google's GKE Labs has introduced OpenRL, an open-source project that provides a self-hosted API for post-training and fine-tuning Large Language Models (LLMs) on standard Kubernetes clusters.
By Sergio De Simone
Technology companies are extending AI beyond code generation into earlier stages of the software lifecycle, including PRD validation, design inputs, and code review. Initiatives from Uber, DoorDash, and Cloudflare highlight a shift toward AI-driven governance layers that evaluate engineering artifacts before implementation while preserving human oversight across the development pipeline.
By Leela Kumili
Naomi Saphra discusses 5 rules governing language model behavior, breaking down why LLMs act like populations rather than individuals. She explains how tokenization creates strange semantic blind spots and highlights the mechanics of sycophancy, showing how models leverage subtle data associations to match user biases and demographics - even guessing political views based on favorite sports teams.
By Naomi Saphra
With the Reactive Data Layer Architecture (RDLA), you establish a clear boundary between public data APIs and private, framework-specific data-source implementations. Your presentation layer operates in a purely reactive manner, observing data changes rather than procedurally querying them. RDLA also simplifies testing by encouraging you to program to interfaces and use clean seeding patterns.
By Mervyn AnthonyLucide has released version 1.0 of its open-source icon toolkit, marking its first stable major release. The update features over 1,600 icons and removes trademarked brand icons due to legal and design concerns. Significant performance improvements have also been made, reducing package size and adding context providers for various frameworks. Users upgrading should be aware of breaking changes.
By Daniel Curtis
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