Paul Grenyer

Norfolk Developers  are extremely lucky to have Phil Trelford returning for both the evening event and a workshop the following day. Details are below. Please sign-up now. What: Functional Hands on Workshop with Phil Trelford When: Thursday, January 8, 2015 @ 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Where: The King's Centre, King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH How much: £20.00 Sign-up Prerequisites: A laptop with F# installed. Ham or Spam In this session, we'll learn about the Naive Bayes classifier, and take a classic Machine Learning problem, recognizing Spam from Ham. Hands On FParsec FParsec is a parser combinator library for F# that let's you quickly build a recursive-descent text parser. This session will introduce parsing domain-specific and general purpose languages using FParsec. Along the way we'll also cover creating a simple Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with discriminated unions, and interpreting or compiling the language using pattern matching. What: W...

I booked tickets for the wrong night and I’m so glad I did! The Cure announced two dates at the Hammersmith Apollo in December and I was ready at 9am on the day they went on sale as if I failed to get them there was no way Charlotte would forgive me. When the list of gigs came up I selected the latest one as I assumed that would be the least popular. Little did I know that they’d added a third date last minute and that was the date I had bought tickets for. After the initial panic with what I thought was the wrong date on the confirmation email I decided it didn’t matter. After the second of the three nights I looked up the setlist online. Charlotte has told me of a number of bands she wants to see and asked me to look out for tickets. The first was Placebo. I’m not the biggest Placebo fan ever, but I thought as long as they play Nancy Boy, which I like, it’ll be fine. They didn’t. I’m not the biggest fan of the Cure, but I love Friday I’m in Love. They didn’t play it on either of ...

Recently I was interview by Mark Pryce-Maher for his 'Five Minutes With" series of audio interviews. He asked me about me, SyncNorwich , Norfolk Developers and the up coming Norfolk Developers Conference ( NorDevCon ). You can listen to the full interview here .

What:  Write your own compiler in 24 hours When: Wednesday 7 January 2015 @ 6.30pm Where:   The King's Centre , King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/205707742/ Compiler writers are often seen as the stuff of myth and legend. In this session we'll step behind the proverbial curtain and reveal how compilers actually work. Expect plenty of live code samples, primarily in F#, covering language design and parsing, all-the-way through to emitting code. This session is aimed as a primer for those interested in writing an external DSL, general purpose language or just understanding how these things work. Phil Trelford ( @ptrelford ) Phil Trelford is a Software Developer and Architect. He's been using .Net since v1.1 and programming in F# for over 7 years. Phil is a regular speaker, trainer, blogger, open source author and co-organizer of the London F# Meetup.

I enjoyed the Battle of the Five Armies a lot more than the Desolation of Smaug . The first 90 minutes with the battle with the dragon and the arrival of the Elves just flew by. Then the main battle, which was most of the rest of the film was done extremely well and it didn’t feel like there was too much of it this time. Billy Connolly was superb, as you would expect and Richard Armitage proved even more than before what a fantastic actor he is. Evangeline Lilly was mesmerizing, very different from how she is in Lost. With the exception of Feely and Keely the other dwarves weren’t featured much as individuals, which is a shame. Having read the book and listened to the audio book many times it was horrible knowing who was going to die and waiting for it to happen. The new story that was added was very good and all fitted well. However the Orcs from the North never seemed to arrive, let alone get defeated. I’m sure just the killing of the white orc wouldn’t have defeated them. Mayb...

The MS Society proudly sponsoring NorDevCon 2015.  Multiple Sclerosis (MS) affects more than 100,000 people in the UK. The MS Society is a national registered charity committed to improving treatment and care for people with MS and funds vital research to help beat the disease for good. We spoke to Anita O’Hara Corporate Partnerships Manager and passionate campaigner for  people affected by MS about what attracted the charity to NorDevCon 2015. Anita explains “this conference presents a fantastic opportunity for us to raise awareness of MS and share with the conference the vital work that MS Society does and why it’s so important. The conference attracts people from all over the county and further afield so it’s a great way to generate interest about getting involved with the MS Society to a large group of people.” The conference is ripe with small to medium sized tech companies, both established and up-and-coming and as Anita points out the technology industry “is a...

Wow! What a fantastically busy year. We’ve just been adding it all up and in 2014 we ran 11 regular evening meetups, 9 full or half day workshops, 4 special events, 3 lunches and 1 conference. That’s 28 events! We’ve also grown organically to over 500 members ! We decided not to run an event in December as there’s so much else going on and it’s difficult to get people to attend.  Plus, Dom and Ben left Norwich temporarily to go to London and be Techstars with Rainbird. Don’t worry though, Norfolk Developers will be back with a full programme starting in January. January The regular evening event sees Phil Trelford, who spoke at the very first Norfolk Developers event, returning to Norwich for the third time to speak about functional programming in F#, with his presentation ‘ Write your own compiler in 24 hours ’. This is followed the next day by a full day F# workshop featuring ‘Ham or Spam’ and ‘Hands On FParsec’ . More detail are on the website. The workshop will cos...

It's been an exciting week for  NorDevCon  2015. Not only are tickets selling well (over 100 sold for the conference and about half the wine reception and dinner tickets sold), but NorDevCon was featured in the  Eastern Daily Press  this week. Ben Woods, the business editor, wrote a piece on how the conference is calling on East Anglian businesses to back Norwich’s technology sector. You can read the full piece  here . Please go along and leave a comment! In the next few weeks we'll have some more exciting additions to the  conference agenda  and about new sponsors for the conference. In the meantime you can buy your tickets and find out about sponsorship opportunities on the NorDevCon website  here . Please spread the word about the conference as it's going to be fantastic for agilists, developers, designers and businesses.

Here at Naked Element we design and build made to measure, enterprise software and cross platform mobile apps. What’s more our entire business has been built upon the quality of the work we produce as well as our collaborative partnerships with clients. This means that our clients not only get what they want, but what they need and what’s truly best for their business. But, what does made to measure, enterprise software and cross platform mobile apps really mean? Let’s break it down: Made to measure – Everything we design and build is truly bespoke. The market has shown that the one-size-fits-all approach to software development can no longer provide a solution for many of today's business needs. Enterprise Software – is the term used to describe purpose-designed business orientated software solutions that are designed to satisfy the needs of a particular company as well as individual users. Our enterprise software can stand alone or be integrated as an extension of cu...

There are loads of networking groups in Norwich, even more than there are tech groups! I haven’t been to that many. In fact it’s only four. There’s an breakfast club that I attend every other Thursday, another run my Lorna Burrows that I tried once, the BNI and now Breakaway Networking . Breakaway Networking meet at the Refectory at Norwich Cathedral every Thursday morning at 7am. I was invited along to their ‘Big Breakfast’ by Nick Applin who is their current chairman and runs his business out of Whitespace, just like Matt and I do with Naked Element. The Big Breakfast happens every 6 months or so and involves inviting lots of guests and listening to a guest speaker. I believe that their regular meetings are smaller affairs, attendees being predominantly members. I’m looking forward to finding out. The Big Breakfast started off with the usual informal networking over tea and coffee. I met some new people and bumped into some of the usual networkers I see everywhere (you know who...

Don’t bother. Gone Girl , although clever, is overly drawn out and nothing new. It’s 18 rating appears to be due to a single bloody scene and some serious language towards the end. Neither added anything to the story. The second quarter of the film is extremely slow. Ben Affleck doesn’t really make the lead role his own and is completely overshadowed by Rosamund Pike and Carrie Coone. Go and see Dracula Untold instead. We wish we had.

What:  Natural Language Processing & How to diagnose SQL Server performance When: Thursday , 6th November 2014 @ 6.30pm Where: The King's Centre , King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/198132992/ Natural Language Processing of A&E Patient Notes Richard Astbury ( @richorama ) Richard will be talking about a recent project where he took 7 years of patient data from the A&E at Leeds General Hospital, and ran it through some natural language processing algorithms to extract rich information. This helped to inform clinical decision making, save money, and support the wider community of services in Leeds. He'll be talking about the challenges on the project, and the tools, tricks and techniques used to extract useful information from hand-typed notes. Richard helps software businesses around Europe migrate their applications to the cloud. Richard is a Microsoft MVP for Windows Azure, an experienc...

Norfolk Developers was delighted to welcome Ian Massingham of Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Norwich last week to give an introduction to AWS. The video is now on our YouTube channel and you can also watch it below: Introduction to AWS What it is, why is was created and what are the fundamental services that make up the service.

Alis Rowe ISBN-13: 978-0956269324 We were recommended the Girl with the Curly Hair soon after our eldest son was diagnosed with Aspergers. I read about 70% of it while I was at Bloodstock this year. It was very easy to read and immediately gave me insight into some of the things that our son was feeling and why. Alis Rowe is clearly an extreme case and it was also reassuring to know our son isn’t. I am very grateful to her for writing this book. It makes it clear that people with Aspergers sometimes struggle to understand how people without Aspergers feel and why they behave in the way that they do. It also made me realise people with Aspergers who may seem very selfish, are not really. In Alis’ case there is a clear understanding and acceptance that people without Aspergers feel differently to her. I am hoping that as our son (11) matures he will come to understand the world around him as well as Alis does.

I was recently asked on Facebook by Matt Roach to list my top 10 albums. I’m a huge (rock) music fan with a collection in excess of 1,500 albums (which, interestingly doesn’t include any INXS) and although I managed to put a list together I was kinda happy with in about 10 minutes, it was a hugely difficult task for me. Here, in no particular order, is what I came up with. Misplaced Childhood by Marillion This is a fantastic musical and emotional journey. Fish’s 35 minute description of his broken heart together with Steve Rothery’s better-than-gilmour guitar playing is just incredible. I love listening to this album, but i have to be careful as it always puts me in a melancholy mood which can make behaving like a normal human being difficult for the rest of the day. The Crimson Idol by WASP It’s difficult to explain why this is such a good album. The way WASP use BC Rich guitars, the drumming, the chorus hooks and the story to this magnificent concept album are certainly ...

It was over breakfast, early one morning, that Julie ‘Jobhop’ Bishop asked me if I’d speak at the upcoming Epic Hootup . It was only for 15 minutes, so I said I would. The  Epic Hootup is a relaxed gathering during Social Media Week with speakers describing how social media is changing business today. I didn’t really have much that I could say directly about how social media was affecting Naked Element , but social media is how we got SyncNorwich , Norfolk Developers , etc. going and how we keep them going. Naked Element’s support of Norfolk Developers has a clear positive effect on Naked Element so I decided to talk about the Norfolk Tech community and meetup.com . Especially as I think meetup.com is one of the forgotten social media platforms. The event was held at Epic Studios in Norwich on Tuesday 23rd of September and was run by Chris Greenfield of Bright Yellow Marketing and Julie Bishop of Jobhop . About 200 people attended from the 300 or so tickets that were taken...

Waring! Spoilers! Charlotte and I love Outnumbered. We’re lucky to have intelligent, resourceful children, so it makes us laugh a lot. What We Did on Our Holiday is written by the same team and I think Andy Hamilton and everything he does is just fantastic. I didn’t think this would be my sort of film as it doesn’t have guns, aliens or Kira Knightly in it, but it was great. Not only was it a great story well written, it was mostly superbly cast. Billy Connolly in particular was very good. In fact the only thing that let the film down a little was how badly cast David Tennant was. He just wasn’t very good. The idea of three young children building a raft from what they found on a beach, loading their dead grandfather onto it, pushing it out to sea and setting fire to it the way he asked was just genius.

Tech City UK , along with Duedil, MTM London and Angelist, have launched a short survey as part of their Tech Nation report - the first ever to map UK’s digital capabilities. As a nationwide survey we want to make sure Norwich is properly represented. This will be great in highlighting the expertise that exists here and revealing the support that is needed to help you grow.  If enough Norwich companies respond, we will be profiled separately in their final report - please help to get Norwich on their map! By participating you will be entered into a draw for the chance to win one of 10 iPad mini 3s, tickets to the NOAH Conference, and most importantly, have your company profiled in the final Tech Nation report. You can take the survey here . If you have any difficulties please email: technationsurvey@techcityuk.com 

Norfolk Developers has been filming its speakers for nearly 12 months, but never actually managed to publish a video. This has mostly been due to lack of time and skills to edit the videos and get them online. However, Naked Element and Norfolk Developers have a new recruit, Emily Crittenden who is gradually working through the backlog. Here is the first of many: The Joy of Generators Rupert Redington ( @rupertredington ) In the near future Javascript will gain a raft of new features, amongst them generator functions. In this session we'll figure out what they are (you might already know from encounters with similar features in other languages) and explore a few surprising applications. For the most part we'll focus on using generators to flatten out asynchronous code - including an introduction to Koa, a next-generation, generator-based web-framework. The session will be illustrated with examples from a map of the UK's public loos. Rupert ran away from the the...

Ermine Sandler has been on my radar for a little while. Mostly via twitter. It was clear to me straightaway that she is a huge personality in the local business community. I was lucky enough to bump into her at a SyncNorwich event a while ago and a week or so later we got together to find out what each other was doing. It was a productive meeting and I believe things are starting to come of it already. During the meeting Ermine invited me along to a free workshop she was running on increasing business influence. I’m involved in a lot of things outside work and my free time is at a premium, but I was determined to make it along as I definitely need to be exposed to more non-tech events and people. I’m really glad I did. It was excellent. Despite having checked the dress code via twitter and being told that people were coming along in whatever they were wearing at work, I do wish I’d upgraded my shorts and sandals! Next time. The event started, as so many do, with informal netwo...

Norfolk Developers is an extremely active group. Every month, usually on the first Wednesday we run our regular evening event at 6.30pm at the Kings Centre , which consists of two 45 minutes tech presentations. Usually one presentation is given by a local speaker and the other by a visiting speaker. Most months we we also run a full or half day hands on workshop, also at the Kings Centre. And of course, every February, there’s NorDevCon, Norfolk Developer’s one day Agile and Tech conference. It’s been a busy year already and there’s even more to choose from in the autumn. Starting with the September full day hands on workshop is being run by Rainbird on Monday, 15th. Norfolk Developers is delighted that Rainbird have chosen to run their first hack day with us. Rainbird is a cloud-based artificial intelligence platform that enables developers, businesses and students to create powerful expert systems on any subject.  The Rainbird development process starts with a visual...

What: Norfolk Developers: An Evening with AWS When: Wednesday 1st October 2014 @ 6.30pm Where:   The King's Centre , King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/176177212/ Level: Beginner Introduction to AWS What it is, why is was created and what are the fundamental services that make up the service. AWS Demo Demo showing the deployment of basic AWS services such as EC2, S3, ELB, CloudFront & RDS. Deployment of a (very simple) php application into this environment using all of these service components.

What: Rainbird Hack Day When: Monday 15th September 2014 @ 9.30am to 5.30pm Where:   The King's Centre , King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH How much: £15 Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/200672852/ Level: beginner / introduction "Rainbird is a cloud-based artificial intelligence platform that enables developers, businesses and students to create powerful expert systems on any subject. The Rainbird development process starts with a visual process similar to mind-mapping (we call it knowledge mapping) and is backed by a new XML-based knowledge representation format called RBLang.   As your knowledge base matures,the results can be published as a powerful web tool or an API that other people can consult with to retrieve the knowledge and solve problems." During this inaugural  Rainbird  Hack Day, 30 developers from Norfolk Developers will have just one day to conceptualise, collaborate, create, build and prese...