Seattle Xcoders Talks This Week Considered Unmissable

The title is a little over the top, but barely — we have two fantastic talks this Thursday (March 5) that you should go to. (I’ll be there!)

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.

If you’ve seen Laura talk before, then you know how good she is, and you know how you come away with insights and ways to be a better engineer and better human-who-works-with-people. Every single time.

This is one of those very rare chances to see Laura in a small setting before she does this talk at a conference keynote. Like seeing the Beatles in a small bar in Liverpool, only it’s Laura in Seattle. 🎸

Jake Savin will present a talk on using Claude to do a really big ambitious job — rebuilding 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.

I’m not the only one to have a try — more than one try, actually, as recently as last year — at rebuilding Frontier. It took Jake and Claude together to make this work (and it’s not done yet, but far advanced from any previous try).

I’m so ready to have Frontier back in my toolbox — and ready to learn from Jake on how he’s making this happen.

What’s Frontier?

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.

Anyway — here’s the scoop on where and when to be:

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

For anyone who wants to hang out after — we go to the nearby Watershed Pub and Kitchen (all ages friendly).