Paul Grenyer

Norfolk is very lucky to have a thriving tech scene, one which supports growth and encourages its members to help each other where they can. Adrian Pickering from Epos Now experienced this firsthand when he was after an experienced educator for his developers and was introduced to Kevlin Henney . Adrian saw Kevlin give a talk on ineffective coding habits in 2015 at the annual nor(DEV):con and thought he might be the right person to help train his developers. "He’s a world-class speaker and educator of object-orientated programming best practices.  More than just being hugely capable and knowledgeable, Kevlin is witty and charming, making his lectures pleasurable and memorable. He gave a two-day workshop on code quality, TDD and SOLID practices for our developers at Epos Now, with a lecture-style presentation on day one and a workshop on day two.” "I ran a software craftsmanship seminar and workshop for them” says Kevlin "covering a range of development practice...

Cloud computing means storing and accessing data and applications over the Internet, instead of your computer's hard drive. In essence the Cloud is a metaphor for the Internet. Nearly every internet user is using the Cloud in some way, they just might not realise it. The Cloud can be broadly divided into 3 different types: Public cloud - owned and operated by third-party providers so no hardware or maintenance costs and offers a pay as you go approach to their IT services. Easily scalable. Private cloud - bespoke infrastructures designed to cater for a specific business, hosted at a data centre or on-site. Hybrid cloud -  combine the best bits of both public and private clouds depending on the operation you’re looking to perform. More and more businesses are consuming IT through the cloud, but switching from in-house hosting to the Cloud can seem like a big step for some businesses.  As with most things in life and online, there are pro’s and cons associated with ...

When you think about networking and presentation venues in Norwich the castle doesn’t immediately spring to mind, but it should. Think about it. The castle has a prominent position within the city, offers fantastic views of the city, has plenty of open space inside for mingling and/or dinner tables and has, it turns out, a fantastic auditorium.  This was the setting for the Leader’s of Norwich City Council Business Reception. As I walked across the bridge towards the keep, lamenting the old days when you could walk up the various steps which wind their way around the mound, I bumped into Huw Sayer who had just completed a circuit of the top of the mound. This is something I had never done, which is odd when you realise I was born and raised in Norwich and have visited the castle many, many times. Huw suggested we do the circuit together, so we did and took in the fantastic city of Norwich. We were welcomed into the castle’s rotunda where drinks were available and we could m...

Integration is all around us.  It’s what makes stuff work together seamlessly and, when done well, it means we don’t even notice it. An integration is essentially joining two or more things together. In tech terms we all take advantage of an integration every day when we charge our mobile phones or tablets. Our chargers plug into the mains with a three pin plug where there is a large alternating current voltage. Our chargers transform that large voltage into the smaller, direct current voltage required to charge our devices’ battery.  The charger also provides a smaller plug which fits into our devices. Our chargers integrate our devices with the mains supply so that they can charge safely. Here at Naked Element , we are experts in integrating radically different computer systems with very different organisations of data (map locations, for example) so that they can talk to each other seamlessly. For example, we can: take your database system and get it to talk to you...

It’s Easter so time for something different. We spend as much time as we can reading to our kids. When they were younger they enjoyed books such as The Crocodile Who Didn’t Like Water: “Everybody knows that crocodiles love water, but this little crocodile is different. He doesn’t like water at all. In fact, he prefers climbing trees!” My eldest son (12) is vegetarian, but like a lot of children he doesn’t really like many vegetables. I always thought I should write a book called The Vegetarian Who Doesn’t Like Vegetables for other children who don’t like vegetables. I am increasingly of the opinion that this would be very unfair on my son, as I am the software developer who doesn’t like typing! I’ve always been impatient. That’s how I got into software development at the age of 8. I was too impatient to wait for the games to load from tape on my Acorn Electron, so I started writing my own programs instead, which was far more satisfying, even if I did frequently hit the limits o...

We were delighted to have John Beer of the Centre for Advanced Knowledge Engineering speak at the fourth Norfolk Developers breakfast at the Maids Head in Norwich. I’ve heard a lot in the last week about how the problem with getting young people leaving school in Norfolk into jobs is a lack of aspiration. I’ll go into some of the reasons I’ve heard this is the case in another post. What’s interesting is what’s being done about it in West Norfolk. The Centre for Advanced Knowledge Engineering is a £350M development being built on the old Burnham Market RAF base. The intention is to attract Artificial Intelligence and other high tech firms to the region. As well as office space, the site will include a conference centre, incubator space and a new site for a local academy allowing it to double in size to 1500 students in anticipation of the growth expect in the region as a result of building the centre. Local infrastructure improvements, including an upgrade to Ely station, and 6...

The first bit of good news is that the JavaScript workshop was a huge success and you can read more about it and some of the future plans for Norfolk Developers here: http://paulgrenyer.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/javascripting-across-universe.html Another piece of good news is that the NorfolK Developers breakfast with John Beer of the Centre for Advanced Knowledge Engineering on Wednesday is sold out. We’re currently lining up the June breakfast to feature Nigel Lubbock of Steeles Law who will be talking about software licensing. We’ll announce the meetup once it’s confirmed and you can RSVP. April On April 13th we have Ian Massingham of AWS coming to give his presentation on ‘Building Serverless Applications with AWS’, which he was unable to give at the conference. He will be speaking alongside Tom Morgan of Modality Systems who will be talking about his first Hackathon experience. You can RSVP here: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/229484964/ Ma...

What: Building Serverless Applications with AWS & Hackathon 101 - Lessons Learnt When : Wednesday 13th April 2016, 6.30pm to 9.30pm Where: The King's Centre, King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/229484964/ Ian Massingham of AWS returns to Norfolk Developers to give his cancelled NorDevCon 2016 session. Building Serverless Applications with AWS  Ian Massingham ( @IanMmmm ) It is important that you spend as much time as possible on what differentiates the application or service that you are building. Managing infrastructure can detract from this goal. Attend this session and learn how you can let AWS do the undifferentiated heavy lifting for you whilst you focus on building a robust, scalable and highly available applications and services by utilising AWS services such as AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon S3 and more. Forget about infrastructure and focus on your code and the outcomes tha...

I’ve been using JavaScript reluctantly on and off for years. I’m currently working on a project that is highly dependant on JQuery based, handwritten JavaScript. Just as Rupert described in this workshop, I am one of the world’s copy-and-paste JavaScripters, so I thought it was about time I looked at it more closely to see what I was missing. I recently took on an apprentice who also needed to learn JavaScript, so a Norfolk Developers workshop was ideal for us. We all know there’s a software development skills shortage nationally and very much so locally and this is something Norfolk Developers is trying to do something about by introducing a series of introductory workshops aimed at those with little or no experience. Initially Norfolk Developers will be concentrating on web development skills such as HTML & CSS, JavaScript and JQuery. There are also plans for introductory workshops for iOS and Android mobile development. The group will also continue to cater for the more exp...

SyncDevelopHER are offering a free taster session of their Code Club for young people who are interested in coding. The session runs from 10.30am – 1.30pm on Saturday April 16th and is designed for coders who haven’t attended one of the SyncDevelopHER Code Clubs in the past. The taster morning is free but you must register here to attend . Code Club is a group where 12-18 year olds can learn to code in a supportive environment.  There are mentors on hand to help with a variety of different tasks that the students will do. For those with no knowledge there are mentors on hand who can get you started with the basics. The organisation, founded by Vickie Allen , began in order to promote gender equality in the tech industry and the first ever DevelopHER Awards took place in November last year.

On 19th January this year Norfolk Developers ran the ‘ An introduction to working with a relational database using SQL ’ workshop. We would like to know what sort of follow-up SQL workshop(s) you would be interested attending. We’re also intending to run the same beginners workshop again, so if you’re interested in attending, please join: norfolkdevelopers.com Huw LLoyd has very kindly provided us with the following ideas for follow-up workshops: (1) For a 'follow up' course/workshop (i.e. for people who attended the first and want to go further), a natural progression is to build upon the central idea of the introductory workshop which is notion of databases serving particular questions. So we have: i). What kinds of questions a database can support (recap and expansion). ii) The kinds of questions we are interested in for some business function, and the implications for this in terms of record structures. iii). The writing of richer queries, use of filters (where ...

Solid. Tight. Clear. Crisp. Heavy. Are all words that describe Polish progressive death masters Decapitated at the Waterfront in Norwich tonight. The was no repeat of the guitar sound problems from Bloodstock in 2014. And incredibly the PA at the Waterfront was crystal clear too. Maybe the band brought their own. Drawing heavily from 2014 Blood Mantra, Decapitated played 11 songs in an hour as co-headliners with Sylosis. These included a couple from my favorite album Organic Hallucinosis and even something from Nihility. It’s about time Decapitated released a new album and then hopefully they’ll be back to Norwich.

What: What's your biggest time management challenge? When: Wednesday 16th March 2016, 6.30pm to 9pm Where: The King's Centre, King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/225119249/ Speaker: Ermine Amies ( @Sandler_Ermine ) Frustrated by not enough hours in your day? Annoyed that you don't get everything done on time? Over committed? Drowning in email? Procrastinating when you don't want to?  Not making progress on the really important projects at home or at work? Ermine has stepped in to replace the speaker who cancelled. This hands on session will help you work out how to take control of your time management hell. If you were at Ermine's sold out session at NorDevCon , come for a top up and be ready to make a plan to succeed this spring. If you didn't  go to NorDevCon, then you may have heard Ermine got rave reviews. You'll be provoked into thinking about where time goes and some practical ...

A friend and former colleague of mine, Chris 'Frankie' Salt, recently popped up on Facebook messenger and asked me a question: “I wonder if you'd mind answering a Java question for me? It's more of a best practices thing. So, encapsulation vs availability of methods for testing. Splitting your code into functions makes it a lot more readable and it makes sense to make these private as they will only ever be used once. However unit testing demands access to these private methods, I know there are ways around this but I was interested in your opinion.” Me? Have an opinion about unit testing? Many stranger things have happened! Encapsulation is all about hiding code away so that you can change it with minimal or no impact on other parts of the code base which use it indirectly. You shouldn't (ever) compromise encapsulation for the sake of testing. Every private method you write must be callable from at least one public method or via a chain of other private met...

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" - Captain Kirk, Wrath of Khan 1982. From a Norfolk Developers , Naked Element and a personal point of view NorDevCon 2016 was a huge success. We had the largest number of attendees we’ve ever had by a significant margin. The Thursday workshops attracted a total of about thirty people, Friday saw over 400 and there were about 250 on Saturday. Surely the best of times. In his presentation, “Silicon Broad: Bridges not Valleys” Jon Bradford, former MD of TechStars, said that NorDevCon needed to move to a new, larger venue and be 800 people next year. It’s true that in terms of numbers NorDevCon has come a long way from the 160 people who attended its first incarnation, SyncConf. Our current venue is almost certainly the only option for the five track conference format we use. However, with 400 people in the main auditorium the sponsors and lunch area gets a little tight. The other four rooms we use have capacities of...

I hope you’re all recovering from NorDevCon and that you enjoyed the conference. Despite a packed conference, it’s Norfolk Developers as usual in March with our regular evening event on the 16th, a hands on JavaScript full day workshop also on the 16th and the fourth NorDev breakfast on the 23rd. Details below. JavaScript Starter Kit - Beginners Full Day Workshop When: Wednesday, March 16, 2016, 9:00am to 4:45pm Where: The King's Centre, King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH Price: £55.00 RSVP: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/227939409/ Level: beginner Prerequisites: Laptop with wifi, modern browser, text editor This day-long workshop aims to cover enough ground to give you a broad base from which to start your quest. We'll use plenty of practical exercises to  explore the language. We'll cover some of the tricky parts which often mystify people - especially handling asynchronous code, which is one of the language's great...

nor(DEV):con attracted over 400 people this year, the biggest turnout yet! There were international speakers, fully booked workshops and a great atmosphere over the whole weekend. This year's new business track proved popular, especially Ermine Amies' 'Time Bandits' session, with delegates taking away practical tips and advice on how to better use their time, and Jon Bradford's 'Silicon Broad: Bridges not Valleys' about the future of tech startups. The EDP covered the conference , which will be held from Thursday 23rd to Saturday 25th February next year, and already has a number of big names lined up! Keep an eye on the nor(DEV):con website , or follow them on Facebook and twitter to be kept up to date. Lastly, a massive thank you to everyone who supported and attended the conference, it was a HUGE success because of you! Words: Lauren Gwynn