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.

Amit Navindgi discusses the systematic shift at Zoox from fragmented documentation to an AI-driven ecosystem. He explains how they built "Cortex," a secure platform integrating RAG, multi-modal LLMs, and contributor-friendly agent APIs. He shares practical strategies for driving adoption through AI champions and hackathons, emphasizing the move from deterministic workflows to autonomous agents.
By Amit Navindgi
Moonrepo has released moon v2.0, its first major update since v1, featuring a plugin-based toolchain system and support for multiple configuration formats including JSON and TOML. The CLI has been restructured, enhancing task inheritance and Docker integration. Notable changes include a shift in architecture and improvements to VCS support.
By Daniel Curtis
Fast-scaling teams must rebuild trust and psychological safety as their social systems expand. Intentional, redundant communication across multiple formats can keep everyone aligned. Cross-team rituals, buddy systems, and rotating facilitators can reduce silos by building bridges between teams. Leaders accelerate this by modeling the vulnerability they want to see.
By Ben Linders
Pinterest identified and resolved CPU starvation issues that affected machine learning training jobs on its Kubernetes-based platform, PinCompute. The engineers traced the problem to an unused Amazon ECS agent, which caused memory cgroup leaks. By disabling the agent, they stabilised performance. This case illustrates the importance of understanding system defaults for effective troubleshooting.
By Mark Silvester
Anthropic published a postmortem tracing six weeks of Claude Code quality complaints to three overlapping product-layer changes: a reasoning effort downgrade, a caching bug that progressively erased the model's own thinking, and a system prompt verbosity limit that caused a 3% quality drop. The API and model weights were unaffected. All issues were resolved April 20.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
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