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.

DuckDB Labs recently released DuckLake 1.0, a data lake format that stores table metadata in a SQL database rather than across many files in object storage. The first implementation is available as a DuckDB extension and includes catalog-stored small updates, improved sorting and partitioning options, and compatibility with Iceberg-style data features.
By Renato Losio
JobRunr has introduced ClawRunr, an open-source Java AI agent for scheduled, recurring, and one-off background tasks. Formerly JavaClaw, it runs on users' hardware and combines conversational interaction with persistent task execution, MCP tools, browser automation, and web, Telegram, and Discord channels, while using JobRunr for scheduling, retries, and monitoring.
By Diogo Carleto
Confluent introduces a new approach in Apache Kafka that moves schema IDs from message payloads to record headers, aiming to simplify schema governance and evolution. The update integrates with Schema Registry, improves compatibility across serialization formats, and reduces coupling between data and metadata in event-driven architectures.
By Leela Kumili
Meta has unveiled a new AI-driven capacity efficiency platform that uses unified AI agents to automatically detect and resolve performance issues across its global infrastructure, marking a significant step toward self-optimizing systems at hyperscale.
By Craig Risi
Hilary Mason shares her journey from academia to building AI products at scale. She discusses the shift from discrete engineering to probabilistic mindsets, explaining why managing "human considerations" is the hardest part of the stack. She explains the "existential crisis" for engineers, arguing that great architecture today is about context management, systems thinking, and good taste.
By Hilary Mason
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