Paul Grenyer

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...