Codetown ::: a software developer's community
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It's a good book, especially for community leaders. In fact, if you like the book you might want to join Jono and about 200 other community leaders for the Community Leadership Summit. This free un-conference runs every year the weekend prior to OSCON. I attended for the first time last year and really enjoyed myself.
Jeff
Thanks, Jeff - between the Community Leadership Summit, OSCON and Open Source Bridge, I may as well move to Portland. Oh well, there's always Portlandia. Yes, the Community Leaders Summit looks like a good conference. Thanks.
And, thanks for inspiring me to take a second look at this book. I just picked it up again and read "The Building Blocks of Building Buzz", which I find to be the greatest reward of being part of an online community. People love to contribute when they feel comfortable enough to actually engage. Do you find yourself agreeing with Jono's approaches in this book and sometimes saying "Hey, I do that when I build communities"?
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.

Pinterest Engineering cut Apache Spark out-of-memory failures by 96% using improved observability, configuration tuning, and automatic memory retries. Staged rollout, dashboards, and proactive memory adjustments stabilized data pipelines, reduced manual intervention, and lowered operational overhead across tens of thousands of daily jobs.
By Leela Kumili
Franka Passing discusses the architectural shift of Duolingo’s 500+ backend services to Kubernetes. She explains the move toward GitOps with Argo CD, the transition to IPv6-only pods, and the "cellular architecture" used to isolate environments. She shares "reports from the trenches" on managing developer trust, navigating AWS rate limits, and productionizing early adopter services.
By Franka Passing
How can you focus in a sea of results from a large regression test suite? This article describes a stochastic approach that relies on some degree of redundancy in your CI regression test set. This approach does not guarantee you will catch every bug every time, but it gives you your best bet of not missing the subtle signatures of all the bugs uncovered by your CI regression test suite runs.
By James Bornefelt WestfallIn this episode, Thomas Betts and Adi Polak talk about the need for context engineering when interacting with LLMs and designing agentic systems. Prompt engineering techniques work with a stateless approach, while context engineering allows AI systems to be stateful.
By Adi Polak
A 600-run benchmark by Ruby committer Yusuke Endoh tested Claude Code across 13 languages, implementing a simplified Git. Ruby, Python, and JavaScript were the fastest and cheapest, at $0.36- $0.39 per run. Statistically typed languages cost 1.4-2.6x more. Adding type checkers to dynamic languages imposed 1.6-3.2x slowdowns. Full dataset available on GitHub.
By Steef-Jan Wiggers
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