Paul Grenyer

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...

This is my first film review for quite some time! We haven’t stopped going to see films, I’ve just been so busy with Norfolk Developers , NorDevCon and Naked Element . Hopefully normal service will resume soon! Usually Charlotte falling asleep is the sign of a good film. However, that’s not the case with Lucy . I wouldn’t go so far as to say it was dreadful, but it certainly was awful. It’s a shame because it’s an excellent idea, it’s just very poorly executed. Scarlett Johansson does nothing for me and I feel sorry for Morgan Freeman as in my opinion his agent found him a lemon. Some of the bits of the film didn’t fit, like why Lucy ended up in a prison cell when the rest of the mules boarded their planes for Europe and when she was on a plane later she appeared to disintegrate and then woke up in a hospital bed. It’s almost like the producers got bored halfway through and couldn’t be bothered to finish it properly. It’s rare that I think a film should be longer, but Lucy shoul...