Paul Grenyer

J.R.R. Tolkien must be turning in his grave. I came away from seeing The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (in a stifling Odeon IMA) in several minds.  It’s true that only about 25% of the film followed the original story and there were a number of scenes that left out detail that could have been included, such as the encounter with Beorn, Bilbo taunting the spiders in Merkwood and Bilbo putting the lids on the barrels before the dwarves are pushed through a hatch into the river by the Wood Elves. Maybe some of these will be featured in the extended edition. I’m also struggling with the fact that there were no Orcs in the book either, just goblins. After the first thirty minutes I stopped being annoyed and started trying to see the film as a film, rather than as an adaptation of a book. And then it occurred to me that although the Hobbit is an excellent book, it’s quite a simple story and may not translated directly into a film well. Although the film felt unnecessarily long, a...

Trite as it may sound, I moved to Norfolk for love. I was working in London to pay for a flat in Colchester which I wanted because it was an easy commute to my job in London. My girlfriend, however, lived in Norfolk and I was travelling to see her every weekend. Clearly, the only logical move was to get a second mortgage, based on my London salary; jack in my job the instant that mortgage cleared and move to Cromer with two mortgages, no income and no job lined up. My thinking at the time was that my wife (a zoo keeper) would find it hard to find work if she moved and I (as a senior java developer with years of banking experience, plus the conceit that that brings) would simply walk into a development job. I had overlooked one tiny detail: there are only about 8 Java shops in Norfolk. It was sheer luck more than anything else that landed me my current role. I’m not sure if the dearth of Java jobs in the county is a reflection on Norfolk or on Java but what I do know is that we de...

What:  NorDev 7: Agile as Enterprise Culture (Aviva) & Preaching The Gospel (Neontribe) Where:  Virgin Wines, 4th Floor, St James' Mill, Whitefriars, Norwich, NR3 1TN When: Wednesday 9th January 2014 @ 6.30pm Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/152603352/ Stories from Suncorp: Agile as Enterprise Culture  Rob Hills (Aviva) As part of Aviva’s ambition to adopt Agile the group COO created an exchange programme with the Suncorp Group in Australia and New Zealand. A team of 4 Aviva people travelled over to see the Suncorp IT and Business operations in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane from July to October this year. What we saw was an organisation that has been on a long, challenging and rewarding journey to embrace Agile at Enterprise scale within the Insurance and Banking sector. This talk will share the background to the exchange programme and the companies involved, share what we experienced including a video we creat...

I don’t think I ever want to go and see Paul Foot again. Some of his act was funny, but most of it was just silly nonsense, although the concept of distractions seemed to work quite well. I don’t understand how he can get away with jumping into the crowd and touching people, let alone laying across people. Maybe everyone else there knew what to expect.

It wasn’t until I checked in on Foursquare that I actually managed to find out who was supporting The Pixies . It was The Jezabels . They were surprisingly good. They only played for half an hour and the first three songs all sounded the same, but it was good and in places quite dramatic (I like dramatic!) and the drummer was excellent. I won’t be rushing out to buy their album or EPs though. The best I can say about the Pixies is that they sound much better live than recorded and I think the PA in the Hammersmith Apollo did them justice (the last time I was at the Apollo was for Europe and they were fantastic). Unfortunately they did nothing for me, although the 100 minute set (we didn’t stay for the encores) did pass quite quickly and the rest of the room, including my wife appeared to be having a fantastic time. The Pixies are clearly talented musicians with an adoring fan base, they’re just not for me.

I was at university and about 20 when I really discovered reading for pleasure. I started with Arthur C. Clarke’s A Space Odyssey quadrilogy and then moved on to the Rama series. I read Arthur C. Clarke pretty much exclusively until I was 29 when I discovered Alastair Reynolds and Richard Morgan. Now I read other stuff too. The thing about Arthur C. Clarke is that he rooted all of his stories in real science. Now that I’ve read other authors I see that sometimes the story suffered because the science was often favoured over the story. There was a lot of hype around the new Gravity film starring Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Surely there’s only so much of a story you can write about two people in space suits stranded in space? I did wonder if it was just going to turn into a dialogue between them until they were unexpectedly rescued - luckily I was wrong.  Although I was also reassured by the fact the film was advertised as only 90 minutes long. Gravity could have been an...

Is it really nearly December already? Of course nearly a new month means that NorDev is not too far away! Next week we have an extra special NorDev day for you. In the afternoon there is a Neo4j workshop with Ian Robinson of Neo Technology and in the evening a double header on mobile from IBM with Andrew Ferrier and Vladimir Kislicins. Full details are below. There are still spaces for, so please RSVP and come along. As always, if you are signed up and you can no longer make it, please let us know by updating your RSVP. NorDev in January will be a little later than usual as the first Wednesday in January is the 1st of January and we suspect many of you will still be recovering from the night before. So NorDev will be on Wednesday 8th January. We have Aviva headlining and talking about an exchange programme they did with an Australian insurance firm who are very agile. Alongside Aviva we’ll be hearing from local firm Neontribe. Many of you will remember Harry Harrold from the quest...

The second issue of the Norfolk Tech Journal is due out in the middle of next week. The website is attracting about 50 to 150 views a day (during the working week). We have a single paying advertiser and a significant production and printing overhead. I need to increase the views (ideally 1000+ per day) and the number of advertisers and I am looking for some help. A marketeer of the required scale I am not. There are lots of marketing agencies in Norwich and I am hoping that some of you are prepared to help me. In return I can offer advertising and features in the journal and I’m happy to discuss other ways I or one of my projects may be able to help you in return. If you’re interested in helping market the Norfolk Tech Journal, please drop me a line: paul@nakedelement.co.uk .

In this, the fith part of Winter Is Coming we take a look at three more sessions from next year’s NorDevCon . Tickets for NorDevCon on Friday the 28th of February 2014 are on sale now! You can buy your ticket by following the link below: http://nordevcon2014.eventbrite.co.uk/   DD The Other SDLC PDD, or Panic Driven Development, isn't what you'd consider to be a mainstream Software Development Lifecycle, but it's out there, and it's adoption is surprisingly high. Scarily, most teams don't even know they're using it. It doesn't matter if you're Waterfall or Iterative, RAD or RUP, Agile or Lean, you almost certainly use some elements of PDD. In moderation this can be A Good Thing™ but too much PDD can kill a project, and left unchecked it can kill a company. To make things worse, many people think they're implementing Agile techniques when all they're doing is embracing PDD and all that's wrong with it. This session aims to highlig...

I’m a fraud and here’s why. I am a huge advocate of Test Driven Development (TDD). I’ve even written an introduction to TDD . In his book Test Driven Development by Example [TDDbyExample] Kent Beck defines TDD as a process where you must write tests for code before writing the code itself. Therefore if you’re doing TDD you have to write the tests first, right? Wrong! I really feel like unburdening, so here’s another admissions. I’m addicted to the green bar and high code coverage percentages. For those that are unfamiliar with the green bar, it’s a feature of the JUnit (and other testing framework) GUI. If all your tests pass you get a green bar. If any of your tests fail, you get a red bar. I’m addicted to the green bar, I can’t sleep without it. There are tools that allow you to measure how much of your code is exercised by your tests as a percentage. Usually anything over 80% coverage is considered good. I always strive for 100%, but usually achieve high 90s. I can’t sleep ...

What: Hybrid Mobile Project - Best Practices and an Introduction to using IBM Worklight When: Wednesday 4th December @ 6.30pm Where: Virgin Wines, 4th Floor, St James' Mill, Whitefriars, Norwich, NR3 1TN Sign-up: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/141440522/ The Norfolk Developers Christmas special is a double header on Mobile and IBM Worklight Best Practices from Andrew Ferrier and Vladimir Kislicins of IBM’s mobile division. Hybrid Mobile Project - Best Practices and an Introduction to using IBM Worklight   In this presentation, we look at some of the best practices we have developed for working on hybrid Mobile Projects. We'll start with a brief recap of web and mobile development models, then focus on the content within the hybrid container, building to discuss JavaScript toolkits and frameworks, looking at how they make mobile web development more straightforward, and how a framework for structuring larger applications can help. We...

In this, the fourth part of Winter Is Coming we take a look at three more sessions from next year’s NorDevCon. Tickets for NorDevCon on Friday the 28th of February 2014 are on sale now! You can buy your ticket by following the link below: http://nordevcon2014.eventbrite.co.uk/ XP at Unruly Unruly is the leading global platform for social video marketing. Founded in 2006, we now have 11 offices and employ over 125 people globally including Germany. We've been applying eXtreme Programming (XP) from the start and that's still a core part of how we develop our software products. As our company and customer base has grown, we've had to figure out how to shape user stories and make plans with stakeholders spread across US and Europe. We also have grown our tech team so we can continue to develop new product offerings with rich user-experience while improving our underlying infrastructure to handle a growing amount of traffic and data. Come to this session to hear about ho...

There are a few things I’ve waited twenty years for and I’ve written about some of them on this blog. In August 1992 I was on holiday with my parents. I don’t remember where, but I remember the cottage we stayed in and my sister’s radio that we listened to Atlantic radio on constantly. I knew one of my friends from school was at Donington Monsters of Rock and that they were broadcasting it on Radio 1. So I sneaked away to my bedroom and try to tune it in. Radio 1 reception was awful. Thunder were playing, but I soon got frustrated with the sound quality. When I got back to Norwich I started “collecting” the albums by all the bands who played: Iron Maiden Skid Row Thunder Slayer WASP The Almighty and soon they all became firm favorites of mine. In the twenty one years since 1992 I have seen all of these bands multiple times, except for Skid Row. I went to my first Monsters of Rock in 1994 (Aerosmith headlined) and I went again in 1996 (Kiss and Ozzy), but I missed 1995 when...

Alexei Sayle doesn’t really do Have I Got News for You, Mock the Week or Buzzcocks. I have vague recollections of him doing stuff on the TV the 80s and 90s and of course Indiana Jones and the Young Ones. So I didn’t really know what to expect. He was funny and I enjoyed it, but if I’m honest I found the swearing too much, a lot of the details of politics went over my head and £17.50 (each) for 75 mins isn’t really value for money. Would I go again? No, not unless my wife wanted was keen to see him again and then I’d be happy too.

All of the videos filmed at this year's MobDevCon are available now on InfoQ: http://www.infoq.com/mobdev-con-2013/ They are also linked from the presentation descriptions on this year's site: http://mobdevcon.com/2013/ Next year MobDevCon will be on the 9th of July and the call for papers will be going out over the coming weeks.

“If I was going to start a software company, it wouldn’t be in Norwich” are words I actually said in 2008 when asked why the startup company I was working for was based in Norwich. Of course I’ve since changed my mind. I set up Naked Element Ltd. with Matthew Wells in 2012 for many of the same reasons that the startup I was working for in 2008 was in Norwich. In 2011 my wife and I had one of those life changing experiences and I found myself back working in Norwich and determined to find out if there were technical people here. It is a source of extreme pride for me that I, along with the other founders of SyncNorwich and Norfolk Developers, built a strong and growing technology community in Norwich and Norfolk. I have been lucky enough to work with some of the best software engineers in the world and I find the level of talent and experience here in Norwich astounding. More than twelve months ago now I was sat in Warings cafe talking to Julie “Jobhop” Bishop and she was lamentin...

In this, the third part of Winter Is Coming we take a look at three more sessions from next year’s NorDevCon. Tickets for NorDevCon on Friday the 28th of February 2014 are on sale now! You can buy your ticket by following the link below: http://nordevcon2014.eventbrite.co.uk/ All your types are belong to us! Big Data tasks typically require acquiring and analysing data from a wide variety of data sources, visualizing the data and applying a barrage of statistical algorithms. This talk will show how this can be accomplished in Visual Studio on Windows or Xamarin Studio on Mac and Linux using F#'s REPL and Type Providers. Type Providers give typed access to a wide range of data sources from CSV, JSON and XML to SQL, OData and Web Services, instantly without a code generation step. The Type Provider mechanism can also be used to analyse data with direct access to statistical packages like R and MATLAB as well as all the existing .Net libraries. Finally visualizations can...

Tickets for NorDevCon on Friday the 28th of February 2014 are on sale now! You can buy your ticket by following the link below: http://nordevcon2014.eventbrite.co.uk/ There are 50 Super Early Bird tickets at £50 + fees and 450 Early Bird tickets at £75 + fees. We are offering significant discounts for students and the unemployed. Please email paul@nakedelement.co.uk for details. There are 80 places for the conference dinner (3 courses, 2 glasses of wine and speakers!) and tickets are £35 + fees. The Virgin Wines reception is free to attend for conference attendees and there are 80 places. Check out the website for the confirmed speakers, sessions and programme: http://nordevcon.com Speakers for the remaining slots will be announced over the next few weeks. The call for papers is now closed. Please find details of further highlights in the second part of Winter Is Coming below. The Conference Dinner The conference dinner will be held in the evening following the con...

When Pete Roome and Rob Barwell left Norwich for their big break in the big smoke, you could be forgiven for thinking that NRUG might die there and then. This is not the case. The group is now in the very capable hands of Matthew Bennett-Lovesey. There were lots of new faces tonight or at least faces that were new to me at this NRUG event. Ben Hammond works at Further and has moved from Perl to Ruby. Mark Hannant is a senior SEO consultant, also at Further. Kieron Johnson is a freelance ruby developer. Rob Anderson works for Payment Card Solutions , a Rails and Ruby shop, who also sponsored the refreshments this evening. The venue for this NRUG was Further , an award-winning online marketing & SEO agency. Their offices are in The Old Church on St. Matthews Road in Norwich. They were very nice indeed. Rapid Development with Ruby, Sinatra, Bootstrap CSS, DataMapper and SQLite Phil Howard Sinatra is an alternative to Rails. Phil took us through a simple example of h...

One week from now tickets for the Norfolk Developer’s conference ( NorDevCon ) go on sale. NorDevCon is a one day Agile and tech conference in the heart of Norfolk, in the heart of winter. Details of the keynote presentations and speakers, as well as some other highlights from NorDevCon can be found below. From 1st November you can buy your ticket here: http://nordevcon2014.eventbrite.co.uk/ Opening Keynote: Software Apprenticeships: This Time It's Personal There has been much talk about apprenticeships for software developers, but between employers, academia and practitioners we've struggled to find a model that works for proper long-term apprenticeships. After nearly a decade of personal research into the problem, I'm embarking on my first apprenticeship with Computer Science undergraduate Will Price, applying an experimental model where experienced practitioners like me coach and mentor young programmers directly. In this presentation, I'll outline our simpl...

Since I started Agile East Anglia in December 2011 I am very happy to say that everything I’ve been involved with (SyncNorwich, Norfolk Developers, SyncConf, East Anglia MongoDB User’s Group, MobDevCon etc) has been very successful. We’ve built it and they’ve come, but my run of good luck had to end sometime and almost two years is a pretty good run. It would appear that now is not the right time for C# Training in Norwich. Naked Element Ltd. has sold a single place out of a eighteen places, with a required minimum of sixteen places and the trainer has found some other solid work for the same week. Therefore it is with a lot of disappointment that I have been forced to cancel the training (the one place sold has of course been fully refunded). They say these things come in threes (although I’m not really in anyway superstitious). Along side the training, I also had a poor turnout to my session at Agile Cambridge and we had to move the Norfolk Developers hack day as we couldn’t p...

This is the new NorDevCon advert designed by Shelley Burrows at s mellyrabbit .

In around 2002 I read the Gang of Four [GangOfFour] and discovered the Singleton Pattern [SingletonPattern]. The gang of four describe the intent of the singleton pattern as: Ensure a class only has one instance, and provide a global point of access. Like most green developers I thought it was brilliant and used it to hold the database connection for my application as it was expensive to create, I didn’t want to create it until it was needed and I used it everywhere (my application was poorly abstracted). I’d been a member of the ACCU [ACCU] for a little while and had made quite a few friends there who all told me Singletons were bad. I couldn’t see the problem and continued using it happily and didn’t think the extra compile and link time (I was using C++) when I modified the singleton was a problem. Until one day, when we introduced a second database for the application and I needed another version of the same singleton.  I didn’t see at the time that I could have used on...