Paul Grenyer

I’ve been looking for a good, online continuous integration solution since late 2007. It’s useful, even as a lone developer, although running it on your development machine can be problematic, especially as back then I developed on a number of different machines and those I wasn’t using were turned off. IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) was in its infancy then and those providers I spoke to were shocked at the idea of building and running an executable, especially as the boxes were predominantly shared. My hosting provider installed Cruise Control for me, but it never really worked.  In the end I used a spare machine at work to run Jenkins and at home I went without until I decided to buy a server and virtualise it. That worked quite well, but it took a lot of setup and the performance wasn’t great. I couldn’t afford a huge amount of memory or super fast disks. That worked sufficiently for about eighteen months until I gave the machine a good dusting internally and it ref...

Talking smarter together. The best decisions are rarely taken in isolation. They’re the happy outcome of conversation, the back-and-forth of ideas and knowledge, and keeping an ear to the ground. In the fast-flowing waters of software, it’s those ideas, that knowledge, and solid networking that can make all the difference. So why aren’t we talking? Norfolk Software Leaders brings the region's  brightest and best leaders and decision-makers together for clever conversation, smart business, and informal networking. We meet monthly for lunch at All Bar One in Tombland in Norwich. To join the group and find out what’s happening and when, visit the meetup site or contact Paul Grenyer . You can follow Norfolk Software Leaders on twitter, @NorSoftLead . Words: Indi Debah

The Monuments Men isn’t a sci-fi and it doesn’t have Keira Knightley in it, but it does have guns! So it just about meets my loose criteria for a good film. The Monuments Men is fantastic and perfectly cast. You should go and see it. There have been a lot of films for older actors in the last few years and they’re usually cheesy, entertaining, but ultimately rubbish (although I do love the expendables). It moves along at a reasonable and consistent pace throughout. As with a lot of World War II films, it starts with a specialist team being put together from soldiers and other professionals who have been put out to pasture. But unlike a lot of other films this isn’t drawn out or over detailed. There aren’t really any action scenes either, but they weren’t missed because there was a story.  The climax is quite low key too, but fits perfectly with the rest of the film.

I don’t get to SyncIpswich as often as I’d like. It’s a shame because they’re such a friendly crowd, especially when you consider I’m from across the border. Carl Farmer has been running SyncIpswich at the Eastern Enterprise Hub for ten months now and he’s doing an excellent job. There were about 30 people there to hear Jason Firth . In my experience this is a good number for a January event. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the proximity to Christmas and the New Year, I don’t know, but people just don’t seem to like coming out in January or February. Tonight wasn’t helped by the fact the venue wasn’t ready and was locked up when Carl arrived. We could see the lack of lights as we walked across from the far side of the bay. It was rather disconcerting. However when we arrived we were directed to the bar to wait, where we roughed it. It was clear from the moment he shook my hand and beamed that Jason Firth “wasn’t from round here.” Now living locally, he was at SyncIpswich to...

For this first time in its short history, Norfolk Developers used a different venue for its evening event. Fusion at the Forum is a great space for technical events with its wall to ceiling projector screens that wrap around most of one wall of the room. Why the change? Simply because we could and we wanted to see what it was like. And we loved it! It’s difficult to determine the predominant programming language in Norwich. There’s some PHP, some JavaScript, some Ruby and some Java. There is also .Net, but we haven’t seen very much .Net at Norfolk Developers before tonight. Scott Price clearly know his stuff and is a very fluent, flowing and interesting speaker. He is obviously very passionate about the ECO Framework ORM and crammed a huge amount of material into thirty-five minutes. We suspect he only scratched the surface of his material. In a twist to the much-loved panel format, Paul Grenyer hosted a Room 101 style competition, with the help of his beautiful “assistant”, Vic...

So here we are nearly twelve months on from the hugely successful SyncConf , the first conference of its kind to be held in Norwich. The February Agile and tech conference baton has been passed from SyncNorwich to Norfolk Developers and now is Norfolk Developers’ time to shine and shine it will. In the pages of this issue of the Norfolk Tech journal you will find all the details of the Norfolk Developers Conference ( NorDevCon ), the Virgin Wines reception and the conference dinner. In terms of content it is already Norfolk’s biggest tech event. Now it just needs people like YOU to come along and enjoy what is guaranteed to be a fantastic day. You will also find details of how to buy a ticket. You’re holding in your hands (or reading online, etc) the fourth issue of the Norfolk Tech Journal. I don’t remember when the idea for the Norfolk Tech Journal popped into my head. It will have been sometime in 2013, but I am not sure when. The first posts started going onto the website in...

What: NRUG: Workshop: Rails from scratch When : Tuesday, 18th of February 2014 @ 7.15pm Where: The Old Church, St Matthew's Road, Norwich, NR1 1SP Sign-up : http://www.meetup.com/Norwich-Ruby-User-Group-NRUG/events/163258602/ Our next meetup is scheduled for the 18th February, 7:15pm. We have a short workshop planned, which will be a very simple introduction to Rails aimed at beginner Rubyists. We'll be taking you through a typical Rails workflow and making an application for storing Gists (code snippets). You'll need a laptop with Ruby installed (>= 1.9.3) if you'd like to code-along with the group. Some Ruby knowledge would be helpful, but it's not a requirement. The emphasis will be on helping beginners get started. At the end of the workshop (which will last about an hour-and-a-half), you'll hopefully have a taste for Rails development. We will then retire to the pub to celebrate / commiserate. The meeting will take place at Further'...

NorDevCon Early Bird Tickets at £75.00 will end on Friday 14th February. Discount codes (except STUDENT and UNEMPLOYED) and Conference Dinner Ticket sales will also end on Friday 14th February. After this time, only Standard Conference Tickets at £200.00 will still be available. Get your tickets now here: http://nordevcon.com .