Skip to main content

Breakaway Networking Norwich

Image
By
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 you are!). At around 7.30am we all took to our tables in groups of about eight and Nick welcomed us all and suggested we did a quick round table to get to know each other before the food arrived. This we did. On my table I was joined by someone from the Benjamin Foundation, Breakaway’s charity for 2014, someone who worked in Health and Safety, another who cleaned computer workstations, a bathroom designer and fitter, someone in HR from Office to Office, a recruiter and singles matcher and a security consultant (the traditional kind, not internet security). All of them had a story to tell and all of it was interesting.

Following the breakfast Nick introduced Lee Todd, director at Just Regional, a local news magazine. Lee gave a fantastic talk and described how he saw the way news is consumed changing and suggested to Archant that they start a publication that concentrates more on local news. They weren’t interested so he left Archant and started up on his own, working a number of jobs to fund his dream. Just Regional is now very successful and employs a number of people.

The morning was rounded of with a presentation of £1000 to Break. About £350 was raised from the Big Breakfast and the members of Breakaway made it up to £1000.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

By
  In order to gauge the potential audience for my book, So you think you can lead a team? , I conducted a small survey of my colleagues, co-workers and anyone from Linked. I read regularly, for work and pleasure, and assumed everyone else did too but did the responses I received confirm this? I polled 173 people, all within the software engineering field (including Product, etc), with a range of ages and years of experience in their role. What surprised me the most was that the majority of people, young or old, just starting or seasoned, still prefer reading physical books to blogs or e-readers. It also seemed that the older and more experienced were the most keen in learning more, and reading to expand or update their knowledge.  When it comes to reading habits between different roles the survey showed that software engineers and team leads read more regularly for their career than other roles, with 55 years old and over and 16+ years experience being the biggest readers over...
3 comments
Read more