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.

Pinterest Engineering cut Apache Spark out-of-memory failures by 96% using improved observability, configuration tuning, and automatic memory retries. Staged rollout, dashboards, and proactive memory adjustments stabilized data pipelines, reduced manual intervention, and lowered operational overhead across tens of thousands of daily jobs.
By Leela Kumili
Franka Passing discusses the architectural shift of Duolingo’s 500+ backend services to Kubernetes. She explains the move toward GitOps with Argo CD, the transition to IPv6-only pods, and the "cellular architecture" used to isolate environments. She shares "reports from the trenches" on managing developer trust, navigating AWS rate limits, and productionizing early adopter services.
By Franka Passing
How can you focus in a sea of results from a large regression test suite? This article describes a stochastic approach that relies on some degree of redundancy in your CI regression test set. This approach does not guarantee you will catch every bug every time, but it gives you your best bet of not missing the subtle signatures of all the bugs uncovered by your CI regression test suite runs.
By James Bornefelt WestfallIn this episode, Thomas Betts and Adi Polak talk about the need for context engineering when interacting with LLMs and designing agentic systems. Prompt engineering techniques work with a stateless approach, while context engineering allows AI systems to be stateful.
By Adi Polak
A 600-run benchmark by Ruby committer Yusuke Endoh tested Claude Code across 13 languages, implementing a simplified Git. Ruby, Python, and JavaScript were the fastest and cheapest, at $0.36- $0.39 per run. Statistically typed languages cost 1.4-2.6x more. Adding type checkers to dynamic languages imposed 1.6-3.2x slowdowns. Full dataset available on GitHub.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
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