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Issue 05 of the Norfolk Tech Journal Out Now!

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This is the first issue of the Norfolk Tech Journal that you won’t be able to hold in your hands (unless of course you’ve printed it yourself). We’re making the journal purely digital for the time being to explore that channel more thoroughly and to target it at a wider audience. We’re working on a facelift for the journal and a marketing strategy that will get it in front of more people.
As always, watch this space and if you can help us, now’s the time to shout.
I’ve written before about how Agile East Anglia, the group that went on to be part ofSyncNorwich was inspired by the Extreme Tuesday Club (XTC) in London. Another group I’m a member of is the ACCU (formerly the Associate of C and C++ Users). The ACCU hold a conference that inspired the Norfolk Developers Conference. The ACCU conference runs for 5 days and includes a full pre-conference tutorial day and four days with four tracks, ending on a Saturday. It usually attracts between 300 and 500 people. One day I hope NorDevCon will be of a similar size and structure.
Since I joined in around 2000 and the proliferation of C++ has declined, the ACCU has often had a crisis of faith. They, including me, are not sure what they are or what they want to be. This has come to the forefront again in the last few weeks as membership has dropped significantly. There is a fee for joining the ACCU which gets you the associations magazines and a discount on the conference. So dropping membership numbers puts the magazines in jeopardy. The future of the ACCU isn’t looking bright, but I for one hope it can find a way to continue. It could be that the conference becomes the main focus and rest is allowed to slowly fade away.
The ACCU does have two things that I am quite envious of and hope we can find a way to incorporate into Norfolk Developers (NorDev). It has a large international membership and a very active mailing list which stimulates communication between its members. NorDev has a mailing list ready and waiting and in the coming weeks we’ll be pushing it quite hard.
You can download isssue 05 of the Norfolk Tech Journal here and view it on Issuu here.

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