Paul Grenyer

Breakaway is a relaxed yet focused networking breakfast. It all kicks off around 7.15am. As people arrive they relax by grabbing a hot drink, chatting and greeting familiar faces and one or two new ones. From about 7.30 they sit down and  each member does ‘one minuter’, Some people talk about their business and some about current trends relevant to their sector. Paul spoke about The Norfolk Developers Conference (NorDevCon) business track which this year is better for business than ever before. The majority of conference delegates are part of an SME so the opportunity for B2B networking is extensive. Nick Applin said some very kind words to the group based on his experience from NorDevCon in 2015 and we hope to see a few more faces from Breakaway this year. Most people at Breakaway opt for a lovely full English breakfast with locally sourced home made sausages. If an English breakfast isn’t to your taste there is a choice of pastries, cereal, yoghurt, fruit, toast and jams. ...

Sometimes I have to take an unexpected day off. Today is one of those days. It’s not something I like doing, but with a young family sometimes it’s necessary. I’m one of the few lucky people who really enjoys what they do, so I’m working on one project or another most of the time.  When I can’t work for whatever reason, I find it quite hard as it feels like all the things I have to do are mounting up. My solution is to put them all on my todo list and then it doesn’t usually take long to plough through them when I’m working again. Some people tell me that I’m a workaholic, but I don’t feel like a person who compulsively works excessively hard and long hours. In fact I’m dreadful at long hours. One of my favorite films when I was a teenager was pretty woman. In the film Vivian, played by Julie Roberts, talks Edward, played by Richard Gear into taking a day off. Complete shock ripples through Edward's office at the news he is taking a day off. Vivian takes Edward to a park and ...

On Sunday I saw Threshold for the tenth time. To say they’re my favorite band is an understatement. I’ve seen them more than any other band, but Marillion, Paradise Lost, The Wildhearts and Skin aren’t far behind. As is common with lots of bands at the moment, there were two support acts. I struggled to see the point of Damnation Angel, although their singer was clearly very talented. Spheric Universe Experience, from France, on the other had were really quite good. Proggy, heavy and well worth the £10 for an album. If I’m honest, For The Journey is my least favorite of the recent Threshold albums, so I was apprehensive about hearing it all the way through. I was delighted, however, to find they were opening with Freaks and Mission Profile before diving into For The Journey. I shouldn’t have been apprehensive as live it was amazing from beginning to end. Although by no means the best song from the Hypothetical album, Oceanborn, which followed, is a superb live track and had me t...

I often find myself describing the structure of tech companies in Norfolk to people. In terms of size we have Aviva at the top, a lower layer of large SMEs such as Validus, Proxama, Virgin Wines and EPoS Now in the middle and then countless micro businesses and smaller SMEs at the bottom. I’ve been aware of Brandbank for a while, but they’ve always been a bit of an enigma to me. It turns out it’s not just me and this is something they’re keen to do something about. It also turns out that with a two hundred strong workforce in Norwich alone, they deserve to be mentioned in the middle layer. To help raise their profile locally, Brandbank are engaging in a number of local activities with the tech and business communities in Norwich. Their CIO Jeremy Glenn has spoken at the Norfolk Network, the company is a partner sponsor of NorDevCon and on Thursday Jeremy spoke about Brandbank to SyncNorwich at Whitespace. Why do Brandbank want to raise their profile locally? They need more softwar...

What: Breakfast with John Beer of The Centre for Advanced Knowledge Engineering When: 7.30 to 8.30am, Wednesday, 23rd March, 2016 Where: The Oak Room, The Maids Head Hotel, Tombland, Norwich, NR3 1LB How much: £11 RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/224772217/ ‘The Centre for Advanced Knowledge Engineering’ a catalyst for changing the Employment, Skills and Aspirations Landscape of the East of England  Aspirations of the current and future generations of school students in rural areas is at an alarming low. Norfolk is no exception to this phenomena. The presentations objective is to outline these challenges and how we all, jointly, can strategically change the East of England regions Employment, Skills, Education and Aspirations landscape by creating a world renowned Centre for Knowledge Engineering i.e. AI and Deep Learning, Data Analytics, Bio-Informatics and Cyber Security. The East of England has now 3 world leading regional research ...

What: The Miracle of Generators & Three years a full-time Go programmer. When: 6.30pm to 9pm, Wednesday 3rd February, 2016 Where: The King's Centre, King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/223381118/ The Miracle of Generators Bobil Stokke ( @bodill ) The ECMAScript 2015 specification introduced iterators, which generalise iteration over common data structures, as well as providing an interface for allowing you to iterate over any custom data structures using common language constructs. ES2015 also introduced generator functions, which make writing arbitrary iterators a lot easier and less boilerplatey. But generators aren’t just for making simple iterators over data structures. Because they’re bidirectional—they don’t only produce output, they can also take input—they’re actually coroutines, which means there’s no end to the sort of fun you can apply them to. We’re going to explore how we can use them to make...

Yes you read correctly. Don’t promote your developers. They deserve to stay where they are. Having worked for a number of companies who believe the only way to show their appreciation for hard working developers is to give them more responsibility, I am a firm believer in doing the exact opposite. Companies move successful developers into other areas of their business, often into people management, and take away what makes the developer good at their job, or at the very least dilute their skills by asking them to focus on people rather than code. But there’s a reason your developer is good at what they do. Most developers are not ‘people people’, they are software people and for very good reasons. If the software development team is writing the core product or system the business is using day-to-day, moving those developers away from developing will have a significant impact on productivity and quality. Even promoting a developer to an architect, for the purposes of paying them m...

On Friday 15th of January I attended the Norfolk Chamber of Commerce ’s careers focus group at the invitation of Caroline Williams. The focus group was looking at the careers service in schools and what could be done to get schools and businesses working together more effectively. Joining us to hear and collate our views were two members of the British Chamber of Commerce. The remainder of the focus group was made up from members of the Norfolk Chamber, leaders of local businesses, schools and colleges. There were 17 of us in total. Before I arrived I wasn’t really sure who was going to be there or what to expect. However, it turned out be a great opportunity to catch up with a couple of people I hadn’t seen for a long time and to make some great new connections. The real eye-opener was what I learned about the school careers system in Norfolk, what many of the forward thinking schools are achieving and how businesses like mine can help to make a difference. I also had the opport...

I thought you'd like to know that Microsoft and the Guardian have joined the NorDevCon  2016 line up! Building applications using the Universal Windows Platform (Friday) Paul Foster (Microsoft) Windows 10 introduces the Universal Windows Platform (UWP), which further evolves the Windows Runtime model and brings it into the Windows 10 unified core. As part of the core, the UWP now provides a common app platform available on every device that runs Windows 10. With this evolution, apps that target the UWP can call not only the WinRT APIs that are common to all devices, but also APIs (including Win32 and .NET APIs) that are specific to the device family the app is running on. The UWP provides a guaranteed core API layer across devices. In this demo rich session, we will have some fun exploring how to build an application to run across several device families. Read more Deep Impact – Agile and Analytics at the Guardian (Saturday) Dominic Kendrick (The Guardian) The talk wi...

When I was younger I always favored the underdog, often for no good reason, but I usually managed to invent one. For example I always build my desktop PCs with an AMD processor instead of an Intel processor. When everyone else had the vapourised Maroon Raleigh Mustang, I got the black and white one. All my friends at school had a ZX Spectrum and I had an Acorn Electron. I even had a betamax video player once, but that’s another story. My dad loves and has always taken part in motorsport. Hill climbs, sprints, classic car trials and more. He even started the local branch of the TR Register (a group for Triumph TR enthusiasts). So I grew up with fast cars all around me and I’ve always liked speed. I often joke that the way I live my life is bigger, better, faster, more. Now I’m approaching 40 it feels more like just bigger! Before I got married I used to have a green Triumph TR 7 with a 3.5ltr, 175 bhp V8. Maybe now is the time to get another one, but that is also another story. In...

As with so many other things, I was late getting into Quentin Tarantino. I tried to watch Pulp Fiction in the 90s as a teeanger, but I quickly got bored. I did see from Dusk Till Dawn as a teenager too, loved it, but didn’t realise at the time it was Tarantino. Many years later, I don’t remember how, I came to be watching Kill Bill and wow! It blew me away. I’ve been a fan since and even rewatched Pulp Fiction. Kill Bill remains his best work but I loved Inglorious Bastards too (despite the subtitles). The Hateful Eight is different. Very different and very good. In the middle it’s slow and I went to a late showing after a long day, which made it a bit more difficult. It has one of the most engaging character building opening parts of any film I’ve seen. Often the character building in films is slow and boring, especially if it’s the first part of a trilogy, but not the Hateful Eight. About half way through it feels like it’s nearly over. Then it goes back to a different thread ...

Come to the  University Technical College Norfolk  in February to hear about the new BBC Micro:bit, an exciting new piece of mini-tech to be handed out in schools across the country. The small, codeable device will be given to pupils in year 7 throughout the UK in a bid to introduce them to technology and coding. The small-but-perfectly formed computer will be Bluetooth enabled, have scrolling LEDs as well as an accelerometer and magnetometer. Find out more and register for the  event here , which also includes a tour of the Technical college. Date:  4th February 2016 from 6.30pm - 8.30pm

I first encountered dependency injection, a pattern that implements inversion of control for resolving dependencies, when I was investigating the web application frameworks available for Java and decided to go with Spring (of course J2EE has dependency injection as well). When you start off with a golden hammer like dependency injection, suddenly every one of your software development challenges looks like a nail. And, as you would expect, all the books and documentation encourage this, although I suspect not consciously. Dependency injection is a fantastic tool if you have multiple components you want to bring together to form a myriad of different applications. The perfect example is of course the Spring framework, because it is exactly that and dependency injection works very well in that context (no pun intended). However, dependency injection should not be your default pattern for every project and if you are using it in a project, you should only use it when it’s really nee...

Sandler have a very different approach to selling to the traditional methods. I’ve been enjoying and have made good and successful use of a lot of the techniques I’ve learned over the last twelve months or so. Never before have I been armed with Norfolk Voice, Metal Hammer, The Guardian, scissors and a gluestick! Neither have my wife and children been invited to the President's Club before. When Ermine told us that the first session of 2016 would be cutting and sticking and we could bring loved ones, including children, I was intrigued and not sure what to expect. However, it turned out to be a very enjoyable session. I took my wife and our youngest, Eddie (4), who was fully engaged throughout cutting and sticking Thomas the tank engine. The task for the grown-ups was to create what is best described as an annotated collage of our aspirations and goals for the year. I always need to make more of my family time, but if there’s one other thing I learnt last year it was that I ...

2015 saw a lot of changes for Naked Element – some good, some not so – but change often makes way for growth and this is what we’re focusing on this year. Undoubtedly the best decision we made last year was taking on our apprentice Lewis . He has handled his own projects with ease and continues to meet every challenge we throw at him – including being on camera! We know he will continue to be an asset through 2016. This new year also holds lots for Naked Element as a whole, as we aim to expand our team and diversify the skills and services we offer. We are always looking to take on more clients and grow our business through networking and research, but we run a referrals scheme too. If you send some business our way, we’ll pay you for the favour! We already have a bunch of fantastic clients that we’re looking forward to working with this year, both large and small, and the next twelve months also sees the development of new services and products, which we are excited to introdu...

by Alastair Reynolds ISBN-13: 978-0575090491 I have this problem with collections of things (trilogies, all the albums by a band, TV series, etc), I have to own and consume them in their entirety. Another problem I have is remembering what happened in early parts of a collection when consuming the later parts. With TV series like Babylon 5 or Game of Thrones it’s easy to sit down and rewatch them in anticipation of the next part coming out. Not so, for me, with books. My reading time is limited and I don’t want to waste it by rereading books I’ve already read when there are so many other books I haven’t read. The exceptions to this were Revelation Space, Redemption Ark and all of the Chronicles of Narnia which I have read twice.  So you’d think that the Poseidon’s Children series would be perfect for me as each one is intended to be read as part of the trilogy or as a stand alone book. Not so. In my ignorance I read Redemption Ark before Revelation Space and spent the wh...

I’m a business owner, software engineer and innovator. Technology is at the absolute heart of everything I do. To allow me to live the sort of life I want to live and work around my family time, I have to be able to work anywhere and at anytime. Going Mobile One major step I took towards this was a few years ago was to ditch my desktop. Working in different places in a pre-Dropbox world meant conscientiously making sure the files I needed were on the computer I needed them on. This meant putting files on a memory stick, copying files to an FTP server or pushing code to a repository before it was ready. There was also a certain amount of phoning and emailing people to ask if they could retrieve and send me a file I’d forgotten. Many people cling to their desktops in the name of performance and because they have a real keyboard, mouse and one or more monitors, rather than an awkward and small laptop keyboard, small screen and trackpad. I fell in love with IBM/Lenovo high end Thi...