Skip to main content

The First SyncIpswich

By

Rivalry is a good thing. Well, healthy competition at least. When you look back through history the major times of technological progress have been at times of war and competition. The first and second world wars. The nuclear arms race between the Russians and the Americans during the cold war. The space race. Formula one teams. And the Shadows (Babylon 5 reference - not Cliff Richards lot).

Last night was the very first SyncIpswich. SyncIpswich is the first SyncCity spin off from the hugely successful SyncNorwich. Carl Farmer is doing an incredible job. I first met Carl at Agile Cambridge a few years ago and he’s another Smart421 associate, like me. Coincidentally, I also met tonight’s speaker, Google’s Daniel Wagner-Hall at the same conference in the same year. It’s funny how these apparently small coincidences trigger much bigger things in the future.

The reason I feel Carl is doing such a good job is that there was standing room only at the very first SyncIpswich. Ok, so the room could have been bigger, but 70 people were crammed in! There were only about 60 people at the first SyncNorwich and, ok we didn’t have google, but there were three feeder groups. Whatever way you look at it, it was superbly impressive tonight.

Smart421 have been amazing sponsors and supporters of the whole Sync brand. Much of this has been down to the sterling work that Joseph Spear has done. Tonight we also had Neil Miles, the MD of Smart421. He gave a rousing speech about making Ipswich and Suffolk  the next Silicon Valley. I would of course fully support this, but I’d like to see Norwich and Norfolk have the same transformation, if not at the same time, then first. It’s slowly happening with SyncNorwich and SyncIpswich and while I hope they work together, I also hope they’ll both grow off the back of very healthy competition.

I was born in Norwich and have lived there for most of my life. My dad was born in Mildenhall (Suffolk) and my mum was born to British parents, in Turkey and grew up in London. Of course no one this evening knew any of that detail, so when Carl introduce me prior to my short history presentation, as being from Norwich I got a few (friendly) groans from the crowd. Needless to say the second slide with the biggest Norwich City badge I could find lightened the mood considerably.

Dan Wagner-Hall spoke about testing at Google at a SyncNorwich last autumn. He was a big crowd puller then and a sensational speaker. People said then and said again tonight that he is clearly passionate about about what he does and makes a traditionally boring subject into something very exciting. Dan has refined his presentation into two 30 minute halves. It was even more engaging and I think the format works well. I’m looking forward to having him speak again at the Naked Element Ltd. testing conference in November.

I’m already looking forward to the next SyncIpswich.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

By
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...
Post a Comment
Read more

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

By
I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...
22 comments
Read more

RESTful Behaviour Guide

By
I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as  Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...
1 comment
Read more