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.

Microsoft's Russinovich and Hanselman argue in a CACM paper that agentic AI creates an "AI drag" on junior developers while boosting seniors, incentivizing companies to stop hiring entry-level engineers. Entry-level hiring is down 67% since 2022. They propose a preceptor model borrowed from medical education to preserve the talent pipeline.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
Open-core DevOps vendor GitLab has shipped versions 18.10 and 18.11 of its DevSecOps platform, with changes that give agentic AI to users on the free tier, that cut the per-review cost of automated code analysis, and give administrators hard limits on how much teams can spend on AI credits each month.
By Matt Saunders
There was a flurry of activity in the Spring ecosystem during the week of April 20th, 2026, highlighting the first release candidates of: Spring Boot, Spring Security, Spring Integration, Spring Modulith, Spring AMQP, Spring for Apache Kafka and Spring Vault.
By Michael Redlich
AWS has recently announced that WorkMail will be discontinued and that App Runner will stop accepting new customers and move into maintenance mode. Several other less popular services and features are also entering maintenance or sunset phases, triggering concern and debate across the AWS community.
By Renato Losio
Cloudflare recently introduced its Gen 13 servers, marking a shift in how its network handles traffic. Instead of relying on large CPU caches for speed, the company redesigned its software to leverage many more processor cores working in parallel in its latest AMD-based servers.
By Renato Losio
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
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