Codetown
Codetown ::: a software developer's community
Kotlin Thursdays
Kotlin is a statically-typed language that runs on the JVM. Developed by a small JetBrains team in St. Petersburg, Kotlin is one of the hottest upcoming languages being used around the world. We're here to grow together as an open-source community and to learn collaboratively!
Crowdsourcing Kotlin-focused Tutorials
From content on the Kotlin language itself to programming paradigms to frameworks, we encourage anyone to submit content on anything Kotlin related. Our goal is learn collaboratively, meaning that the Kotlin Thursdays team is ready to help you submit content to share with others.
How do Kotlin Thursdays work?
Every Thursday, we release new content every season. We have blogs available here in KotlinTown. This season, we're creating webisodes to compliment that content. Code and documentation related to content is available on Github.
Interested in contributing? Head over Github to learn how you can get started :)
Happy 10th year, JCertif!
Notes
Welcome to Codetown!
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.
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Check out the Codetown Jobs group.
InfoQ Reading List
Pinterest Reduces Spark OOM Failures by 96% Through Auto Memory Retries
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 KumiliPresentation: Duolingo's Kubernetes Leap
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 PassingArticle: A Better Alternative to Reducing CI Regression Test Suite Sizes
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 WestfallPodcast: Context Engineering with Adi Polak
In 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 PolakDynamic Languages Faster and Cheaper in 13-Language Claude Code Benchmark
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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