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.

At GrafanaCON 2026 in Barcelona, Grafana Labs announced Grafana 13 with the new Loki Kafka-backed architecture at the ingestion layer and the AI Observability in Grafana Cloud to monitor and evaluate AI systems in real time. In particular, the new CLI called GCX was announced, designed to surface Grafana Cloud data inside agentic development environments.
By Claudio Masolo
Observability must evolve with serverless, event-driven architectures. OpenTelemetry can decouple telemetry from vendors, letting developers emit consistent, high-quality data that explains real system behavior. Shared vocabularies and good telemetry make debugging faster and improve reliability, speed, and developer productivity.
By Ben Linders
Frank Yu shares Coinbase’s engineering philosophy for building resilient, fair, and fast financial exchanges. He explains the power of a single-threaded architecture combined with the Raft consensus algorithm to maintain 24/7 availability. He discusses how determinism enables zero-downtime rolling deployments and the ability to replay production logs for perfect bug reproduction.
By Frank Yu
Dropbox reduced its backend monorepo from 87GB to 20GB by optimizing Git delta compression in collaboration with GitHub. The changes improved clone times, CI performance, and developer velocity, highlighting how repository storage inefficiencies can impact large-scale engineering workflows.
By Leela Kumili
The panelists share insights on evolving company culture. They discuss leveraging feedback loops, lending social capital, and the friction between legacy bureaucracy and agile engineering. The panel explains how to maintain cohesion in remote teams and use interviews to uncover the true "unmanicured" culture of a firm.
By Nicky Wrightson, Suhail Patel, Lesley Cordero, Matthew Card, Natan Žabkar Nordberg
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