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.

Open-source AI coding tool OpenCode features a native terminal-based UI, multi-session support, and compatibility with over 75 models, including Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, and local models. In addition to its CLI tool, OpenCode is also available as a desktop app and and an IDE extension for VS Code, Cursor, and other tools.
By Sergio De Simone
Teams rely on strong unit and integration tests instead of end-to-end tests. Using TDD, pair programming, and good design, they ship small changes often, test in production for real feedback, and use feature toggles to reduce risk, Ola Hast and Asgaut Mjølne Söderbom mentioned in their talk about continuous delivery with pair programming.
By Ben Linders
Google Cloud is bridging a critical gap for enterprises by introducing a gRPC transport package for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), enhancing integration for businesses already using gRPC. This game-changer reduces development friction, ensuring AI agents seamlessly connect with existing services while boosting performance and efficiency. Join the evolving landscape of AI integration!
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
LinkedIn's engineering team successfully upgraded its legacy ZooKeeper service discovery platform to enhance scalability and performance. By leveraging Apache Kafka and the xDS protocol, the new architecture enables eventual consistency, supports multiple languages, and allows migration without downtime. Post-upgrade, latency vastly improved, facilitating hundreds of thousands of app instances.
By Patrick Farry
Sarah Usher discusses the architectural "breaking point" where warehouses like BigQuery struggle with latency and cost. She explains the necessity of a conceptual data lifecycle (Raw, Curated, Use Case) to regain control over lineage and innovation. She shares practical strategies to design a single source of truth that empowers both ML teams and analytics without bottlenecking scale.
By Sarah Usher
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