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.

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
The OpenJDK Amber project has published a new design note proposing “carrier classes” and “carrier interfaces” to extend record-style data modeling to more Java types. The proposal preserves concise state descriptions, derived methods, and pattern matching, while relaxing structural constraints that limit records.
By A N M Bazlur Rahman
Vercel has released Skills.sh, an open-source tool designed to provide AI agents with a standardized way to execute reusable actions, or skills, through the command line.
By Daniel Dominguez
Cursor has published Agent Trace, a draft open specification aimed at standardizing how AI-generated code is attributed in software projects. Released as a Request for Comments (RFC), the proposal defines a vendor-neutral format for recording AI contributions alongside human authorship in version-controlled codebases.
By Robert Krzaczyński
As systems grow, observability becomes harder to maintain and incidents harder to diagnose. Agentic observability layers AI on existing tools, starting in read-only mode to detect anomalies and summarize issues. Over time, agents add context, correlate signals, and automate low-risk tasks. This approach frees engineers to focus on analysis and judgment.
By Rohit Dhawan
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