We’ve got five Thursdays this month, which means two Xcoders socials! Thursday April 16 and Thursday April 30.

We’ll be at Bale Breaker x Yonder Cider in Ballard, outside by the fire things, under cover (in case of rain). Starts around 7 pm, if not a bit earlier, and goes till closing at 9 pm.

See you there!

We have a meeting this Thursday, April 2, where local expert Jared Sorge will talk about modern and flexible CI with GitHub Actions and Fastlane.

Our bet is that you’re going to learn something that will make your engineering life easier. 😀

Where
North Seattle College
9600 College Way N

Room LB 1106 in the library
(Or sometimes next door in 1105)

When
Thursday, April 2, 2026
6:30 pm — gather and mingle
7:00 pm — watch Jared’s talk and learn things

Afterwards we tend to go to the nearby Watershed Pub and Kitchen (which is all ages friendly).

It’s tonight! We’ll be at the usual place and time — Bale Breaker in Ballard 7-9 pm. Note that some people tend to show up early, and you can be one of them. 👍

Topics can and will be anything, but it’s a pretty safe bet that using LLMs for coding will be discussed since that’s such a big thing right now.

We’ll almost certainly be outside by the fire things. It‘s covered, so we’ll be fine if there’s some rain.

And note that you can subscribe to our calendar (see the Calendar page for the link) so you know about these things before they appear on the blog. 🐥

We’ve got two great presentations for our March 5 meeting — Laura Savino’s talk on learning out loud these days and Jake Savin on using Claude to rebuild UserLand Frontier as a modern app.

It’s a huge job and Jake’s made a ton of progress — and he’s learned a lot about how to use Claude to make these kinds of projects work. As we learn to use LLMs to do more and more ambitious things, we’ll be walking in Jake’s footsteps. Jake will provide a map of this new territory.

(Why UserLand Frontier? Why rebuild it? UserLand Frontier is Dave Winer’s app from the ’90s, and it was with that app that Dave invented and/or fleshed-out and popularized much of the open web that we take for granted today: blogs, RSS, podcasts, and web services, for starters. This is a historically important piece of software, and Jake is bringing it to the modern age. Back in the day, Jake worked at UserLand Software along with another Xcoder, Brent Simmons.)

You know how your favorite bands and comics will do small shows first before doing their arena tour? That’s what’s happening here. 💥

Details:

Where
North Seattle College
9600 College Way N

Room LB 1106 in the library

When
Thursday, March 5, 2026
6:30 pm — gather and mingle
7:00 pm — watch Jake’s and Laura’s talks

Afterwards we go to the nearby Watershed Pub and Kitchen (all ages friendly).

We’ve got a great speaker for our March 5 presentation meeting — Laura Savino will present “Learn Out Loud”:

As devs today, we’re supposed to demonstrate immediate skills in tools whose configs change once a fortnight, while shipping cutting-edge features in long-standing apps (that may still have a legacy bug or two). Laura is a trained teacher and Photoshop engineer who brings humor and solidarity to today’s dev environment with concrete advice on the mechanics of real learning and change, including encouraging without proselytizing, being vulnerable about what you don’t know, and staying curious amidst existential dread.

We’ll gush: Laura’s talks are awesome. Well-delivered, thought-inspiring, and fun. We always learn things that make us better.

You should go to this one! Seriously. This is the one.

Where
North Seattle College
9600 College Way N

Room LB 1106 in the library

When
Thursday, March 5, 2026
6:30 pm — gather and mingle
7:00 pm — Laura talks

Afterwards we go to the nearby Watershed Pub and Kitchen (which is all ages friendly).

See you there! 🎩🎸

We’ll be at the usual place and time — Bale Breaker and Yonder Cider in Ballard, Thursday Feb. 19, 7 - 9 pm. Outside in the covered area with the fire things.

Weather’s not looking great, but, again, we have fire! (And it shouldn’t be raining.) So your only excuse for missing it is that you don’t like fire. And that would be a weird thing to not like! 🔥🎩

This Thursday we’ll have a presentation by Geoff Pado on Swift and WASM — a super hot topic!

When: Thursday, Feb. 5. Mingling starts at 6:30 pm; presentation starts at 7 pm

Where: North Seattle College
9600 College Way N, Seattle
Room LB 1105 in the library

Afterwards (optionally, of course) we go to the nearby Watershed Pub and Kitchen, which is open to all ages and is pretty cool.

This Thursday Jan. 15 is the first Xcoders social of the year!

We’ll meet at our usual haunt — Bale Breaker and Yonder Cider in Ballard at 7 pm. Doesn’t look like rain this Thursday, so we will almost certainly be outside. With some fire for warmth. And cover just in case it does rain a little bit.

Tip: if you go to our calendar page and subscribe, you’ll see that we’re getting back to talks soon: there are presentation meetings coming up on Feb. 5 and Mar. 5. 😀