Paul Grenyer

What: SyncIpswich March; Building and Testing software at Google Scale When: Thursday 21st March @ 6pm Where: A central Ipswich location Sign-up: http://www.syncipswich.com/events/101237482/ I was born about a mile from where I now live. The hospital is flats now and my children were born at the new hospital outside the city. I live about fifty yards from the house where I grew up in a city I spent my entire teenage years trying to get away from. I did get away, until I was in my late twenties. Now that I’m back I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else and I’m proud to be from Norwich. Part of being proud to be from Norwich is the friendly rivalry between us and Ipswich (even if, like me, you’re not a football supporter). So I am absolutely delighted to be able to SyncIpswich for the first time in March. The phenomenal success of SyncNorwich has taken everyone, including me, by surprise. It’s only natural that we would want to take this winning formula to other places (I can’t say cit...

Norwich-based software development and start-up special interest group, SyncNorwich, will give all profits from its February conference to kick-start a local business 25 January 2013 - Norwich, UK – SyncNorwich , a special interest group for software developers and entrepreneurs, will give all profits from its 2013 conference to a local tech start-up. The move is designed to provide seed funding to a new business that can prove it has the best chance of success and go on to create local jobs. SyncConf will take place at the Open Venue in Norwich on 15 February 2013. To be eligible, all candidates will need to apply to take part in a Dragon’s Den style competition to be held at a future SyncNorwich event. Each candidate will receive coaching by Richard Patey of StartUpNorfolk, before pitching their business to a panel of judges made up of local, independent entrepreneurs. The funds will be awarded to the winner shortly afterwards. More details about the competit...

SyncConf is now less than a month away. Tickets are selling very well, but there are still plenty left. You can buy your ticket here . One of the jewels in the SyncConf crown is the dinner in the evening. It will be hosted at local Norwich restaurant The Library from 7.30pm. During the course of the meal the speakers will remain seated at their tables while the delegates move around between courses. This is a unique opportunity and your chance to quiz you favorite speakers of the day. The dinner price includes three courses and two glasses of wine all for only £39 ! Please book your speakers dinner ticket here: http://syncconf2013.eventbrite.co.uk/ The speakers dinner is open to everyone, even if you were not able to attend the conference during the day.

Apparently Rob Newman always comes to Norwich to try out new material as no one’s opinion matters this far up the M11! I wish I’d pointed out that the M11 stops a good 60 miles before it gets to Norwich. When I was at school we went on a trip during some sort of design and technology week and on the coach one of my schoolmates had brought a recording of The Mary Whitehouse Experience from the radio. It was brilliant! Shortly after I got addicted to the TV show. When Punt & Dennis and Newman & Baddiel parted company I continued watching Newman & Baddiel on their new show religiously. I saw Punt & Dennis when they came to the Theatre Royal in Norwich, enjoyed them on Radio 2’s It’s Been a Bad Week and more recently on Radio 4’s Now Show . You could say I’m pretty addicted the Newman & Cos particular sense of humour. However, I had never seen Rob Newman live or without David Baddiel (on the TV) so I was really keen to see him, especially as he was playing in Norw...

When I saw the advert on the 10gen site for sponsored regional meetup groups and decided to start one I thought I’d be lucky to get 10 people join the group and half that number to the meetups. Yet again, I was wrong! Despite being an advocate of the technical community in Norwich, it still takes me by surprise just how vibrant it is. As I write this the membership of the East Anglia MongoDB User Group stands at 46 and we had between 25 and 30 people come to the first meeting on Wednesday. We even had some of the regular SyncNorwich crowd from Ipswich! I wanted to start with the big guns, so tonight we had Ross Lawley from MongoDB creators 10gen come and give us an overview of MongoDB and its features and configuration. Although the presentation was very high level, it gave just the right level of detail. At about 35 minutes it was just the right length and led to my second pleasent surprise! There was at least 20 minutes of questions from the group following the presentation. I...

Yesterday lunchtime Seb Butcher and John Fagan spoke to Julie Bishop on Future Radio ’s Norwich Today with Richard & Julie about SyncNorwich and the upcoming first SyncNorwich conference, SyncConf . Julie Bishop is of course SyncNorwich’s very own “Chic Geek” and was very keen to have John and Seb on the show. John, Seb and Julie did us all proud. While Seb explained what SyncNorwich is all about and how it started, John was put on the stop a provided a brilliant off the cuff description of Agile . Julie went on the quiz John about the conference, the speakers and the future Dragon's Den event that will be used to give away the profits from the conference to a local startup later in the year.

I’ve never forgiven myself for missing the first Lord of the Rings film at the cinema, so I was determined to see the first Hobbit film there. We saw it in normal 2D. Overall I enjoyed the film. It’s very good and there are some fantastic action scenes. The scene with Gollum is absolutely hilarious in places. However, and it’s a big however, it’s just too long. They’ve made up stuff that wasn’t in the original book, like the white orc and radagast who was missing from the Fellowship of the ring. Most of the scene with the dwarves at Bagend is tedious. They’ve brought in other Characters from the Lord of the Rings who were not in the Hobbit and worst of all Martin Freeman is still a dreadful actor. Fili and Kili, and the rest of the dwarves for that matter, are very well cast. Richard Armitage is incredible as Thorin, but I couldn’t help thinking his appearance was based on Damian Wilson from Threshold now that he has the beard! The final two hours of the film are, for the most par...

John Fagan writes: Think you could be the next Steve Jobs?   Have you heard about SyncNorwich and SyncConf ?  If not, you should look us up and start getting involved.  Maybe it could lead to a job working for a local company, or your future career as a tech entrepreneur!  Read on and you will find out how this could be a reality. SyncNorwich is the Norwich based Tech and Startup community.   We meetup every month to have a beer and hear from awesome local, national and international speakers.  Topics covered include software development, startups, investing, entrepreneurism, developing ideas and much more.  The community has grown from Zero to 400+ members in 6 months.  It is a prime opportunity to learn, network and get inspired every month.  Thanks to some amazing local sponsors , all our events are free including a lot of the beer!  We’d like to increase the number of students attending our events, so it woul...

I don’t usually blog a review of the SyncNorwich lunches, but the January SyncLunch was something special, we had a speaker! Darren Cook contacted me before Christmas expressing a desire to come and speak to the group. However we didn’t have any meetings on the days he was available, so as the January lunch hadn’t been booked at that time I booked it for one of those days. Darren Cook is a professional data analyst, software developer and entrepreneur. He is director at QQ Trends, a company that solves difficult software and data challenges for its clients. He is currently based in Tokyo, but originally from Norwich, and was in Norfolk over the holiday period this year. He talked about how eating more chocolate allows you to extract more value from your data. Darren has a gentle engaging style that is very easy to listen to and understand. He actually spoke about how the amount of chocolate a country eats is statistically relative to the number of Nobel prizes it has. This had me ...

by William Gibson ISBN: 0006480411 I read this book as it was recommended to me by a friend as a classic. I’m sure it was revolutionary in its time, but I didn't enjoy it. I found it very difficult to follow. It was suggested to me that I should sit down and try and read it all in a couple of sittings. It would probably have made more sense if I had and I may try and do that in the future. I just didn’t warm to the main character, Case. However I don’t think you’re meant to. All the drugs references did nothing for me either. Maybe I didn’t play hard enough in my youth.  I also think software and virtual reality has come on too far for what was in the book to seem magical and new. Unless I re-read Neuromancer and enjoy it, I won’t be reading any more William Gibson.