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.

Mallika Rao discusses the hidden risk of evaluation debt in production AI systems, drawing on her experience at Twitter, Walmart, and Netflix. She explains why traditional metrics fail modern architectures, breaks down a five-layer evaluation stack spanning infrastructure and UX, and shares a diagnostic maturity model to help engineering leaders eliminate silent semantic failures.
By Mallika Rao
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation has highlighted a new AI-assisted migration approach that enabled engineers to migrate 60 ingress-nginx resources to Higress in roughly 30 minutes, demonstrating how artificial intelligence is increasingly being applied to modernize Kubernetes networking and gateway infrastructure.
By Craig Risi
GitHub reports cutting token costs in agentic CI workflows by up to 62% by pruning unused MCP tools, swapping some MCP calls for gh CLI, and running daily “auditor” and “optimizer” agents. A token-usage.jsonl artefact and an Effective Tokens metric help track spend across models and spot regressions.
By Mark Silvester
Trisha Ballakur discusses her journey from a backend software engineer to CTO and CEO, using her startup Pointz as a case study. She explains how to implement bottom-up customer discovery to find product-market fit, effectively delegate to global contractors to reduce build times, customize open-source repos like Valhalla, and apply engineering test-case models to business development.
By Trisha Ballakur
AI bias mirrors human bias; both stem from our language and lived experiences. Ethics and AI are inseparable, but AI changes affordances, making harmful actions easier to carry out. The EU regulations apply to AI, since digital products are products. The ultimate goal is accountability: companies must ensure transparency, and laws should favor using the simplest AI that gets the job done.
By Ben Linders
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