Skip to main content

NorDev1 Review: Liz Keogh: Lean vs. Agile: Fight! & Phil Trelford: F# eye for the C# guy

Image
By
Norwich is a beautiful city. Especially when viewed from the top of St. James' Mill, the venue for the latest group for technologists in Norwich, Norfolk Developers. Norfolk Developers complements the existing tech community and peels back the high level going straight to the heart of software development practices and processes. It aims to bring local, national and international speakers and workshops to Norwich.
On Wednesday evening we made a pretty good start with Norwich favorite and regular Liz Keogh who came from London and Phil Trelford from Ely (Ely can of course be considered nation or local, depending on your point of view). So all we need to work on now is an international speaker!
I love it when Liz keogh comes to speak in Norwich! I first brought her here in June last year for the final Agile East Anglia and then in February of this year for SyncConf. What’s even better is that Liz seems to love coming to see us too and I have plans for her to come back in February. As always Liz was sensational and highly entertaining, even though there were some very important lessons to learn about Agile and lean. I’m not going to tell you who wins the fight because I know Liz wants to use the presentation elsewhere.
I saw Phil Trelford do F# eye for the C# guy before in Cambridge and wished at the time that we could do presentations at that technical level in Norwich. And now we can! In fact we have. Phil has a vast wealth of knowledge of F#, topped only by his enthusiasm for it. The presentation was the same format, a few slides and then lots and lots of code! However this time I was very inspired to install Visual Studio and getting hacking in F#.

Comments

  1. Phil Nash1 July 2013 at 08:59

    "However this time I was very inspired to install Visual Studio and getting hacking in F#."

    Interesting. What changed?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Paul Grenyer1 July 2013 at 09:16

      I was wondering that. Last year the syntax hit me straight away as ugly. This time around it just looked so right. I suspect it was the little bit of Ruby I did last year that changed my mind.

      Delete

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

Remember to Delegate: The Triangle of Trust

By
So you think you can lead a team? I’ve been talking and writing a lot about leading a software engineering team in 2025. I started thinking about it more deeply the year before when I decided to give a colleague, who was moving into team leading, some advice: 'Doing the work' isn't the only way to add value Remember to delegate Pick your battles Talk to your team every day Out of this came a talk, “So you think you can lead a team?” which I gave at work, at meetups and at conferences in various different formats during the first quarter of 2025. Here I am looking at Remember to Delegate and an idea which came out of discussion around the talk, The Triangle of Trust, in more detail. Delegate Delegation is a crucial skill for any team lead, yet it is often one of the most challenging aspects of leadership to master. Many leaders, particularly those who have risen through the ranks as individual contributors, struggle to let go of tasks, fearing a loss of control or a dip in ...
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