Paul Grenyer

This is the introduction of a very good blog post written by my very good friend Phil Nash . Please click on the link at the bottom for the full post. There are many articles on the subject of what TDD is, why and when it is worth it, and which attempt to counter common objections. This is not one of those. Well. Maybe a bit. This is more specifically a response to Marco Arment 's comments in his podcast, Build & Analyze , episodes 107 and 108 . Episode 108 was the last episode so there is an air of finality to the subject matter. Many Mac and iOS developers (as well as developers for other platforms) listen to the show and, while you'd hope they can all think for themselves and reach their own conclusions, it's undeniable that opinions, if not already well formed, may easily be swayed by what a respected figure says in a high profile, and well polished, medium. This can be unfortunate. I'm sure Marco didn't intend to do any damage. I've listened to...

I don’t get to embrace my inner geek very often. By inner geek I mean the part of me that is still hopelessly in love with software development, especially at the code level. This is why I love the Norwich Ruby User’s Group . Pandr were our hosts at Blurtit in Norwich and there were about a dozen of us talking geek for an hour. Tonight’s presentation was from Tom Crinson . Tom's been a Ruby developer for 6 years now, starting off with Rails and then learning everything he could get his hands on with Ruby. Tom was the founder of IPRUG (Ipswich Ruby User Group), he's run Railscamps and presented at LRUG too. You could say, he know's what he's talking about. Tom spoke about Ruby 2.0.  It's coming along with some interesting new features too, some dangerous and crazy, some really handy, some you'll wonder why they weren't in there from the start. Tom gave us an overview about each of the new features, explained how they can be useful or not. Although I do...

The Wulfrun Hall in Wolverhampton is one of those venues, like the Glasgow Barrowlands where I see loads of bands advertise that they’re playing, but under normal circumstances I’d have no reason to go and see them there. On this particular tour it turns out Wolverhampton was the most convenient place for us to get to to see Devin Townsend and Fear Factory . What a great venue! It had one of the clearest sound systems with more definition of sound than you get in a lot of venues, but it was stupidly loud. Ear plugs were even on sale behind the bar. And being the midlands, everyone was really friendly. Looking back, Fear Factory are one of those bands that I thought I really liked when I was at school, but it turns out it was just a couple of songs from the Demanufacture album. When they made a comeback with Mechanize in 2010 I got into them again and bought up their back catalogue. I still only like a few songs from Demanufacture, but the rest of their albums are great especially...

Charlotte and I have been keen to return to Ironbridge ever since we dropped in briefly on our way back from Wales in 2010. Last week we were seeing Devin Townsend and Fear Factory in Wolverhampton, so it made sense to take an extra day and visit Ironbridge. We found an incredible little B&B, the Severn Trow . A former house of ill repute, the Severn Trow has many wonderful features including four poster beds (which got me many brownie points), very friendly and accommodating owners and free WiFi! It rained pretty much the whole time we were there and by the time we’d dragged ourselves out of bed in Wolverhampton and driven across to Ironbridge it was already early afternoon. We had an extremely nice lunch in the somewhat trendy Malthouse . The afternoon was spent wandering in and out of the many gift and ornament shops along the river and chatting to the friendly shopkeepers. In the evening we went looking for and failed to find Da Vinci’s and ended up in another Italian acr...

When the SyncNorwich co-founders and I set up the group in the summer, we had no idea of the amazing response we’d get: over 400 members and a series of fantastic packed events before we even made it to Christmas. But what’s even more satisfying for us that we’re now starting to hear about the real, tangible benefits that the group is having in the local tech community. We know several people have already found new jobs because of contacts made between companies and recruiters at SyncNorwich events (more on that in a future blog post) and local tech start-ups are also reporting great progress towards success thanks to the feedback and advice they’ve received from fellow members. Take the young founders of Incredibli , for example. Lauren Hine and Andy Parker launched the first version of their new online group-funding service in the autumn, just months after graduating from UEA’s Norwich Business School. They’d looked at the graduate jobs market with a growing sense of doom an...

The SyncNorwich team are very excited about our first new SyncCity! SyncIpswich has been setup and is being run by Carl Farmer of Chrysalis Technology . Carl and his team will be bringing a SyncNorwich like group for people interested in technology, Agile and startup companies to Ipswich. The first meetup is scheduled for March and is going to fantastic. I expect you’ll see some of the SyncNorwich team there too! Please give Carl all the support that you can. Follow SyncIpswich on twitter here .

What: An Introduction to MongoDB from Ross Lawley of 10gen When: Wednesday, January 9, 2013 @ 7pm Where: The Reindeer , 10 Dereham Road, Norwich, NR2 4AY Sign-up: http://www.meetup.com/EastAnglia-MongoDB/events/90706402/ The expert speaker at the first East Anglia MongodDB User's Group event will be Ross Lawley of 10gen . MongoDB (from "humongous") is a scalable, high-performance, open source NoSQL database. It stores data as a collection of documents and is one of the most prominent and widely adopted NoSQL data stores. This talk will cover: Getting started using MongoDB using the JavaScript shell. How to creating schemas in a document-oriented DB Look at how you can scale with MongoDB (replica sets, master/slave, auto-sharding) Interesting features for developers (geospatial indexing, capped collections, file storage, upserts and more) There will be time for questions at the end -- plus MongoDB swag to be grabbed.

SyncNorwich is going from strength to strength. A year and a day before the Aviva Christmas Special at Carrow Road , I was sat in the Coach and Horses on Thorpe Road for the very first Agile East Anglia meeting. A year ago there were half a dozen of us, tonight, after the addition of Norwich Startups and Norwich Developer Community and rebranding as SyncNorwich in June, there were 110 of us in one of the most prestigious venues in Norwich. It’s difficult to describe how incredible that feels, so I won’t try, anyone who was there will have seen how much it meant to me. Tonight’s event was sponsored by Aviva. SyncNorwich is very grateful to them for hiring the venue, buying a drink for everyone and three fantastic speakers. First up is Juliana Meyer who gives an introduction to SyncNorwich for those who are new to the group and a recap of many of the events that SyncNorwich has been involved with over the last six months. I have seen variations of this presentation many times, bu...

I was back in London on Wednesday night for the ACCU Christmas dinner and this time I had Charlotte with me. I always enjoy catching up with the core ACCU London crowd and as usual it was a very good night. I’m still not drinking, but the wine was flowing for two couples we’ve know for many years, which meant a it was quite lively. After dinner at the usual Pizza Express on the The Strand we ended up back in ACCU favorite Chandos, just off Trafalgar square. One man has drawn me to work at the banks in London twice and never managed to meet my wife on either occasion (despite being invited to the wedding)! On Wednesday night they finally met...

I don’t always agree with Marcus Brigstocke ’s political views, but he is a fantastic comedian! It’s a shame that on this occasion he didn’t feel he had the audience with him. Some of the laughs were a little slow coming and even over the head of some of the audience, including me at times, but he was hilarious and his observations of recent events genius. We will definitely be going to see him again when he comes back to Norwich. He’s just as good on stage as he is on the radio and the television. Some of the audience were quite concerned when he relieved them of some of their money during the performance. You’ll have to go and see The Brig Society to find out if they got it back. Still not sure about the beard though.

December 2011 to June 2012 Agile East Anglia was started by Paul Grenyer as an Extreme Tuesday Club (xTc) inspired pub meet on Monday December 5th 2011 at the Coach and Horses on Thorpe Road in Norwich. Attended by a handful of people from local firm Aviva it was followed on Monday 9th January 2012 by  a less well attended meeting at the same place. On a cold and snowy Monday 6th February, with sponsorship from Ipswich based consultancy firm Smart421, Agile East Anglia put on a presentation on Agile User Stories given by well known Agile consultant Rachel Davies at The Assembly House in Norwich. Around 20 people attended, predominantly from Aviva, but also people from other firms such as Archant, Smart421, Axon Active AG and Proxama. On Monday March 26th Agile East Anglia put on a second Agile presentation, this time it was a Dialogue Sheets workshop given by Agile consultant Allan Kelly. Again it was at the Assembly House in Norwich and sponsored by Smart421. Around 20 p...

I was recently interviewed by James Chesters of 10gen (MongoDB) about setting up and running user groups. You can read the interview here .

I am sure this is one of those shows that appeals to women of a certain age. Jenny Eclair says as much during the show. I am of course neither. Jenny Eclair is great on Radio 4, but just like Jo Caulfield , over the top and disappointing on stage. There were a number of funny moments, but most of it was too much. However, judging by the reaction of the thin crowd in the Playhouse I was in a minority. It wasn’t a night wasted (an evening out with Charlotte never is), but I won’t be bothering again.