Skip to main content

NorDev Review: Room 101 & More Than Just A UML ORM for .Net?

Image
By
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”, Vickie Allen. (Assistant: noun, Person who does all the hard work.) Competing for fame, glory and the offer of a NorDev t-shirt, were:

  • Chris Holden, Unicycle rider, master of disguise, and incidentally Software Developer for Validus
  • Tim Stephenson, Photographer, Musician, and incidentally Head of IT for Liftshare.com
  • Adam Wilson, Cartoonist, tech event addict and incidentally self employed PHP Developer at Spotted Paint

Items were offered to the audience for submission to Room 101 under three headings.

Round 1: Languages, Microsoft’s Classic ASP & VBScript were sent to Room 101 at the expense of Java and XML.

Round 2: Practices, Waterfall project management is no more, at the expense of “Emails without subjects” and, controversially, Pair-programming.

Round 3: Wildcard, wave goodbye to Non-Technical Managers but be warned – Arrogant Programmers and Microsoft’s Sharepoint are here to stay, at least for now.

Tim won the competition, with two of his choices making it into Room 101 – where they will presumably stay for all eternity, used to torture those who we suspect do not truly love NorDevCon. Classic ASP will be especially effective, development in which has long been considered a gross human rights violation. The loss of the waterfall methodology may well stymie the development of future spacecraft, though this is a price we are all very willing to pay. Even the dinosaurs, when faced with a choice – a waterfall project to build a rocket that could save their species, or near-certain extinction, faced their demise with pride. It’s just common sense.

Chris was the runner up, with an excellent addition to Room 101: The Non-Technical Manager. All Non-Technical Managers are now required to report to Room 101, to live out their days giving Classic ASP software development tasks using the Waterfall methodology to those who doubt NorDevCon. Did I mention that NorDevCon has a track devoted to local developers and issues affecting women in tech? I love NorDevCon. I’m sure you do too.

In my opinion, all runners-up should have been given prizes. As such, I hereby award Adam the prize for “Most Heartfelt Pleading” – despite none of his suggestions making it to Room 101, as he described his nightmarish experiences with subjectless emails, his pain was clearly mirrored on the faces of all attendees. Chris is hereby awarded “Best Paul Grenyer Lookalike & Impersonation”, a dubious honour that I am sure he will either cherish forever or deny vehemently, but which he has earned admirably.

In all, this was a highly entertaining format, one I hope we can repeat in the future – mainly because, I think we all agree: Java, XML and Sharepoint have long outstayed their welcome.

Words: Paul Grenyer & Matthew Bennet-Lovesey

Originally published on the Norfolk Tech Journal.

Comments

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