Paul Grenyer

Mark Dalgarno, with the support of Redgate Software , is using Software East to do great things for the software community in Cambridge. Software East has been running frequent evening events on topics including Agile and iPhone development and attracted a number of ACCU speakers including Allan Kelly, Pete Goodliffe and everyone's favourite Mac pusher, Phil Nash. Not content with rivalling ACCU London 's events Software East has gone further and put on their own Agile conference over two days in the heart of Cambridge. I was pleased to be asked to speak and enjoyed both thoroughly exhausting days. What follows are some of the highlights for me. Agile Cambridge was the first conference I have attended as a Twitter user. It's an amazing tool for not only communicating with the the attendees and passing on words of wisdom from one session to another, but also for keeping those who could not attend up-to-date and wetting their appetites for next time. I do not know what it ...

Although I have done it (tongue in cheek) before, I don't like reviewing my own presentations. So I was delighted when Giovanni Asproni, ( ACCU conference chair) reviewed my participation at Agile Cambridge 2010 and was kind enough to allow me to publish his comments: Rachel (Davies) spoke about building trust in agile teams. Setting aside lots of interesting material about the importance of trust in teams and on various techniques to use or avoid in order to earn trust, the highlight of her keynote was an exercise where Paul Grenyer was volunteered by Rachel to do a stage diving (interestingly enough, Rachel, Allan, Paul and I had talked about it the night before at the pub, but we didn’t think Rachel was going to take the conversation seriously ;-)). He accepted and was caught by a group of six or eight people (which included Jon Jagger and Allan Kelly who joined them to make sure the ACCU didn’t loose one of its most valued members). I’m happy to report that Paul was not hurt ...

By Alistair Reynolds ISBN-13: 978-0575084551 I loved Zima Blue even more than House of Suns . The standout stories in this collection are those based around the Merlin character. Superb space opera from the master. Not every story is a winner and a couple of them are conduits for explaining science. In some places modified humans are back and there's space travel and extension of the human life span. All the classic Reynolds winners. I only have Terminal World left to read now, so Alistair needs to get on and write something else!