Skip to main content

Break-away for breakfast

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.

At every Breakaway breakfast there is a ten minute slot given by one of the members. On this occasion Kirsty Favell told us about cats, cardigans and copywriting. It was a funny and informative talk with great content, everything you’d expect from a very talented copywriter. Kirsty taught us that all writing must start with a SFD and if you want to know what that is you’ll need to ask myself or Paul!


Breakaway finishes off with another round robin with everyone talking about the referrals and the successes they’ve had in the last week. We always get a warm welcome from Breakaway and really enjoy going. The fun and good humour is usually as free flowing as the coffee and we can’t wait to go along again.

Words: Emily Jayne Crittenden & Paul Grenyer


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

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...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

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...

Do software engineering professionals still read? - survey results

  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...