Paul Grenyer

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...

It's been a controversial week on the Norfolk Tech Journal . Have you read Wanted Girl Geeks by Julie Bishop and The Answer is Mainframe, What's the Question? by Kelvin Hoggett-Thompson?