Paul Grenyer

Norfolk Developers  are extremely lucky to have Phil Trelford returning for both the evening event and a workshop the following day. Details are below. Please sign-up now. What: Functional Hands on Workshop with Phil Trelford When: Thursday, January 8, 2015 @ 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM Where: The King's Centre, King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH How much: £20.00 Sign-up Prerequisites: A laptop with F# installed. Ham or Spam In this session, we'll learn about the Naive Bayes classifier, and take a classic Machine Learning problem, recognizing Spam from Ham. Hands On FParsec FParsec is a parser combinator library for F# that let's you quickly build a recursive-descent text parser. This session will introduce parsing domain-specific and general purpose languages using FParsec. Along the way we'll also cover creating a simple Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with discriminated unions, and interpreting or compiling the language using pattern matching. What: W...

I booked tickets for the wrong night and I’m so glad I did! The Cure announced two dates at the Hammersmith Apollo in December and I was ready at 9am on the day they went on sale as if I failed to get them there was no way Charlotte would forgive me. When the list of gigs came up I selected the latest one as I assumed that would be the least popular. Little did I know that they’d added a third date last minute and that was the date I had bought tickets for. After the initial panic with what I thought was the wrong date on the confirmation email I decided it didn’t matter. After the second of the three nights I looked up the setlist online. Charlotte has told me of a number of bands she wants to see and asked me to look out for tickets. The first was Placebo. I’m not the biggest Placebo fan ever, but I thought as long as they play Nancy Boy, which I like, it’ll be fine. They didn’t. I’m not the biggest fan of the Cure, but I love Friday I’m in Love. They didn’t play it on either of ...

Recently I was interview by Mark Pryce-Maher for his 'Five Minutes With" series of audio interviews. He asked me about me, SyncNorwich , Norfolk Developers and the up coming Norfolk Developers Conference ( NorDevCon ). You can listen to the full interview here .

What:  Write your own compiler in 24 hours When: Wednesday 7 January 2015 @ 6.30pm Where:   The King's Centre , King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/205707742/ Compiler writers are often seen as the stuff of myth and legend. In this session we'll step behind the proverbial curtain and reveal how compilers actually work. Expect plenty of live code samples, primarily in F#, covering language design and parsing, all-the-way through to emitting code. This session is aimed as a primer for those interested in writing an external DSL, general purpose language or just understanding how these things work. Phil Trelford ( @ptrelford ) Phil Trelford is a Software Developer and Architect. He's been using .Net since v1.1 and programming in F# for over 7 years. Phil is a regular speaker, trainer, blogger, open source author and co-organizer of the London F# Meetup.

I enjoyed the Battle of the Five Armies a lot more than the Desolation of Smaug . The first 90 minutes with the battle with the dragon and the arrival of the Elves just flew by. Then the main battle, which was most of the rest of the film was done extremely well and it didn’t feel like there was too much of it this time. Billy Connolly was superb, as you would expect and Richard Armitage proved even more than before what a fantastic actor he is. Evangeline Lilly was mesmerizing, very different from how she is in Lost. With the exception of Feely and Keely the other dwarves weren’t featured much as individuals, which is a shame. Having read the book and listened to the audio book many times it was horrible knowing who was going to die and waiting for it to happen. The new story that was added was very good and all fitted well. However the Orcs from the North never seemed to arrive, let alone get defeated. I’m sure just the killing of the white orc wouldn’t have defeated them. Mayb...

The MS Society proudly sponsoring NorDevCon 2015.  Multiple Sclerosis (MS) affects more than 100,000 people in the UK. The MS Society is a national registered charity committed to improving treatment and care for people with MS and funds vital research to help beat the disease for good. We spoke to Anita O’Hara Corporate Partnerships Manager and passionate campaigner for  people affected by MS about what attracted the charity to NorDevCon 2015. Anita explains “this conference presents a fantastic opportunity for us to raise awareness of MS and share with the conference the vital work that MS Society does and why it’s so important. The conference attracts people from all over the county and further afield so it’s a great way to generate interest about getting involved with the MS Society to a large group of people.” The conference is ripe with small to medium sized tech companies, both established and up-and-coming and as Anita points out the technology industry “is a...

Wow! What a fantastically busy year. We’ve just been adding it all up and in 2014 we ran 11 regular evening meetups, 9 full or half day workshops, 4 special events, 3 lunches and 1 conference. That’s 28 events! We’ve also grown organically to over 500 members ! We decided not to run an event in December as there’s so much else going on and it’s difficult to get people to attend.  Plus, Dom and Ben left Norwich temporarily to go to London and be Techstars with Rainbird. Don’t worry though, Norfolk Developers will be back with a full programme starting in January. January The regular evening event sees Phil Trelford, who spoke at the very first Norfolk Developers event, returning to Norwich for the third time to speak about functional programming in F#, with his presentation ‘ Write your own compiler in 24 hours ’. This is followed the next day by a full day F# workshop featuring ‘Ham or Spam’ and ‘Hands On FParsec’ . More detail are on the website. The workshop will cos...