Skip to main content

SyncNorwich 5 Review

SyncNorwich 5 felt like a real homecoming, reminiscent of our first meeting as SyncNorwich back in July. Not only were we back at Blurtit with the truly amazing Kathryn Wright, but the BBQ was back and we had presentations from startups! Of course the free drinks were still in abundance and the crowd has grown and evolved, but this was home. This was the first time Seb Butcher had organised and fronted one of events. Despite forgetting to tell everyone his name, he did a stellar job coordinating some very interesting presentations.

First up were Lauren and Andy from Incredibli . Lauren and Andy are good friends of SyncNorwich and have been to many of our events. This is the first time I’ve got to hear about their startup properly and they both spoke extremely well. I am very impressed with their idea and hope they get the funding they are looking for. SyncNorwich will be putting a campaign through Incredibli in the new year. Watch this space.

Juliana Meyer’s been threatening to tell us all about her startup for quite some time now and tonight she finally did. Juliana is an excellent presenter (that’s one of the reasons the SyncNorwich team loves her so much!) and tonight was her best performance yet. She also used a promotional video to great effect. mBaSo is certainly an original idea and is intended to get new music directly from artists to fans on a monthly basis for a very small fee to the fans, most of which is paid to the artist. Apparently there aren’t any Heavy Metal bands signed up yet, but I live in hope!


Mark Alexander is part entrepreneur and businessman and part stand up comic. He treated us to a very frank session on the things that have gone well, as well as the things that have not gone so well throughout his career and throughout his life, including his book. Mark seems to go from one adventure to the next and I hope he will come back and speak to us again sometime. 

Smart421 review.

Incredibli video.

Mark Alexander video.


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

It's great to be back at the ACCU Conference 2025!

Last week I was back at the ACCU Conference in Bristol, for the first time since I gave an opening keynote in 2019 . In March 2020, COVID hit the UK and I got out of the habit of attending and speaking at conferences. Plus the ACCU Conference, and the organisation in general, took a big step back towards C++ and that hasn’t been relevant to me for nearly two decades. It’s taken until now, 2025 for me to want to talk again, and I was really pleased to be accepted for the ACCU Conference again. It was just a 20 minute session and I only attended for the day I was speaking. There was enough varied content for it to be interesting to me and I’m hoping to be back for the full conference next year. I really enjoyed attending and it was great to catch up with people I hadn’t seen for years. I felt re-engaged and particularly liked being asked if I’d been to nor(DEV):con . Learning to stop writing code (and why you won't miss it) Daisy Hollman I should have read the summary of the openin...

I, Robot

The Foundation series has been my go to for a good, enjoyable read over the last two years, so naturally I moved on to Asimov’s Robot series afterwards. However, the short stories in I, Robot were mostly a disappointment. They feel self indulgent, with too much philosophy and science, Asimov showing off, and not enough story. The most enjoyable moments come from the stories featuring Gregory Powell and Mike Donovan. Their banter and the relationship between them provide some much needed amusement and were easily the highlight of the book for me. However, it did give me food for thought for the current potential issues with the rapid development of AI at the moment, and the many concerns around safety. I wonder if all we need is: An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. An AI must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. An AI must protect its own existence as long as such p...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...