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.

J. Paul Reed discusses the "ironies of automation" - a 40 years-old concept now amplified by AI. He explains how advanced systems often make the human operator more crucial, not less, while simultaneously degrading the skills needed to intervene. Sharing real-world stories of "AI-fueled" incidents, he shares why over-reliance on AI can double recovery times and how to maintain resilience.
By J. Paul Reed
Platform engineering should have a product focus, as developers are customers; they must provide composable, self-service capabilities, golden bricks rather than rigid golden paths, so teams can move quickly while maintaining consistency. Success is measured through adoption, developer experience, and business outcomes such as deployment frequency and change failure rate.
By Ben Linders
The OpenTofu community released version 1.12.0 on May 14, 2026. This update isn’t a complete rewrite, but it does resolve some issues that infrastructure teams have faced for a while.
By Claudio Masolo
Google introduced new Android development tools that enable building apps up to 3x faster by using AI agents, including a redesigned Android command-line interface (CLI), structured skills", and an integrated knowledge base. These tools are designed to support agent-driven workflows and are compatible with third-party agents such as Claude Code and Codex, in addition to Google Gemini.
By Sergio De Simone
Backlogs in distributed systems are arithmetic problems, not mysteries. This article provides practical formulas for calculating backlog drain time, sizing consumer headroom, and setting auto-scaling triggers. It covers key failure modes — retry amplification, metastable states, and cascading pipeline bottlenecks — plus when to shed load instead of draining.
By Rajesh Kumar Pandey
© 2026 Created by Michael Levin.
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