Paul Grenyer

In the 90s there was a ‘Rock Music Magazine’ called Raw Power (later renamed to Noisy Mothers, before getting cancelled) which aired on ITV in the early hours of Saturday morning. I often saw it in the Radio Times and sometime in the early 90s started recording it. As my obsession for Rock and Metal grew I also started reading the fortnightly Raw Magazine , which in the late 90s transformed into a more indie based publication for one issue and then died. At the same time I was buying Kerrang! weekly, Metal Hammer once a month and at some point I had a subscription to Terrorizer magazine. Raw Magazine was always my favorite, but then it went crap and died, Kerrang! became like Smash Hits for Metal kids (or maybe I grew up a bit) and Terrorizer didn’t have enough of a range of metal bands to make it worth the subscription, so I was left with just a Metal Hammer subscription which I maintained for the album reviews so that I knew what was coming out. Last week 2016 claimed anothe...

Every time I’ve seen Jennifer Lawrence on the Graham Norton show she has been drunk and obnoxious. In The Hunger Games she wasn’t exactly a charismatic resistance leader. I’d heard bad things about Passengers and that coupled with the fact it had Jennifer Lawrence in it wasn’t giving me any hope, but the trailer made it look like an interesting sci-fi, so I went to see it anyway. I’m glad I did. It wasn’t amazing, but it was good. I don’t think I’d need or want to see it a second time. If you put aside the fact that it’s set on a spaceship in a universe where hibernation for long distance travel is possible, there isn’t a great deal of science fiction in the this film. It’s a film about morals. What’s more, Jennifer Lawrence is actually quite good in it and not at all annoying. Chris Pratt is also very good in this predominantly straight role (I’ve only seen him in Guardians of the Galaxy before) and of course Michael Sheen is, as always, amazing even in a supporting role. The ...

So much better than The Force Awakens, but still a little way to go and it all ended a bit Blakes 7. After the disappointment that was the Force Awakens , I approached Rogue One with some trepidation. It was slow going to begin with and I missed the usual scrolling introduction to the story so far, but as one of three standalone Star Wars movies I guess there was no story to tell. My heart fell more when there started to be a lot of references to the other films, especially Princess Leia in Return of the Jedi, as this was one of the things that had detracted from the Force Awakens, but they were just references, it wasn’t actually the same story! Half an hour in it was great and I really enjoyed it from that point on. I liked the way it was almost split into two stories with two separate climaxes. I started to get a bit worried towards the end. I remember the beginning of the original Star Wars film (now called A New Hope) and how the Tantive IV had received the transmitted pla...

Nor(DEV):con keynote speaker, Saturday 25th Feb From Coda to Code: The SupaPass Journey Juliana Meyer Join Norfolk Developers to discover the tech startup story, that began from a bedroom in Norwich with a vision for a more efficient rewarding future for creatives, and has led to a globally recognised tech platform working with artists from major record labels. About Juliana Juliana Meyer is Founder and CEO of SupaPass, the fair-trade music streaming app. SupaPass gives anyone with a fanbase their own subscription streaming service. Fans subscribe to a specific creator’s channel from £1 per month and creators earn up to 100% net revenue share of their fan subscriptions. Juliana founded SupaPass to give efficient, fair, transparent revenue from streaming for artists, labels and publishers. Working with global artists like Grammy Award-winning Imogen Heap, SupaPass is exploring cutting edge technology including Blockchain. Prior to founding SupaPass, Juliana Meyer ran her...

Nor(DEV):con keynote speaker, Saturday 25th Feb The Technologist’s Guide to Hitchhiking Seb Rose Are you assessed according to the professional development plan you submitted at last year’s appraisal? Where will you be in five year’s time? Have you ever been hitchhiking? While it’s important to acquire relevant knowledge and skills to further your career, it’s also useful to occasionally reflect on the role that serendipity plays in all our lives. I’m not talking about loosely thought out escapist dreams or delegating your career to a higher power. The best professionals and business people are those that are able to take advantage of opportunities when they arise – something that observers often characterise as luck. If it is luck then, to some extent, we make our own luck. You may be wondering where hitchhiking comes into this. In part, it’s through the long relationship that technologists have had with the work of Douglas Adams and the number 42. Hitchhiking is also a go...

Nor(DEV):con keynote speaker, Friday 24th Feb Are you ready for the coming revolution? Russel Winder UK school curriculum underwent a revolution as of 2014-09: ITC was replaced with programming (aka computer science). Whilst the change itself was campaigned for, and widely wanted, the way government handled the change left a lot to be desired. Some, but not all, universities and colleges have joined in realising the change and preparing for the consequent revolution in university computer science curriculum, c.2018 onward. Are businesses ready for the knock-on change? This presentation will delve into some of the most important and/or obvious issues surrounding this world leading experiment in child education. Ex-academic, Analyst & consultant Russel talks about the important issues surrounding the government’s push for programming in UK schools, and how the way it’s been handled has left a lot to be desired. From 2015 ICT in UK schools is to be replaced with programm...

Norfolk Developers are excited to announce their programme for Nor(DEV):con ’s schools day, put together by Paul Foster, Microsoft in consultation with many members of faculty from different schools across Norfolk & Norfolk Developers themselves. 09:00 Arrival/Opening keynote segment (20 Minutes allowing for arrivals) 09.20 Paul Grenyer & Paul Foster Open event 09.25 Keynote- “Whoops”, and other classic programming phases by Dom Davis, (@Idomdavis). Schools now teach algorithms and programming from the age of 5, so it’s hardly rocket science. Except when it is. And even when it isn’t it goes wrong a lot. I should know, I’ve been responsible for some of that wrongness. The trick is to learn from your mistakes, and to make sure that when it goes wrong, it does so in a way that no one will notice, and definitely not in the ways I’m going to spend this session talking about. 10:00 break 10:25 Guided technology task (2 hour activity) In this activity students will ...

Pre-Conference Special: Machine Learning & Take the risk out of Digital Marketing Warm up for the main conference day with the pre-conference special. Date: Thursday, 23rd February 2017 Time: 5.30pm – 7pm Location: The King’s Centre, Norwich City Centre R.S.V.P: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/233466379/ Take the risk out of Digital Marketing Marcus Hemsley Fountain Partnership In this talk Marcus Hemsley will outline how the most successful Digital Marketing Campaigns minimise risk through accurate forecasting and testing. He will outline the three most important numbers to consider before you take a product or service to market, and discuss the most common mistake businesses make when launching a new marketing campaign. He will conclude the talk by running through the most effective strategies for business growth in 2017. Machine Learning Darren Cook, QQ Trend Darren will be speaking about machine learning, specifically with ...

Venkat Subramaniam ISBN-13: 978-1680501742 I wanted to start this review simply with "Wow! Just wow!", but that’s not really going to cut it. It’s true to say that when I first learned that there was going to be a book published called "Test-Driving JavaScript Applications" I was sure it was going to be the book I had been waiting for since at least late 2007 when I was forced to write JavaScript in production for the first time. It’s publication date was pushed back and back, so it really felt like I was being made to wait. However, I wasn’t disappointed and this book was everything I hoped it would be and more. We all know JavaScript is evil, right? Why is it evil? It’s the lack of a decent type system, the forgiving nature of the compilers and an inability to write meaningful unit tests, especially for the UI (User Interface). It’s difficult to do a huge amount about the first two points, but now JavaScript can be meaningfully unit tested, even in the UI c...

Bluemoon Investigations are a long established company, specialising in covert inquiries for both public and private concerns. From providing evidence to the court in cases of fraud, to tailing cheating spouses across the globe, Bluemoon have had over thirty years experience in getting to the truth. They also run a College training people how to become professional private investigators. They came to Naked Element with a desire to have a better and more efficient client-facing web presence for the College. Online marketing agency Clark St. James had been working with Will Clayton, Director of Bluemoon, to improve their web search rating, and recommended Naked Element to him for a new website. “Our old website wasn’t branded, slow and not working for us, we needed a whole new design to improve communication, speed and our web presence to potential business.” Our designer Shelley took on the challenge and worked closely with Will to get the result Bluemoon wanted. “The process wa...

When I was a member of the ACCU their regular publications always appealed for people to write articles for them. There were a few suggested topics, but the one which stuck in my mind was to write about a class you'd written. I often used to wonder about doing this, but it's quite difficult as I rarely wrote a class which was stand alone enough to write about, without having to write about a load of other classes too. Maybe that's a symptom of a design which is not loosely coupled, but I'll leave that for a late night discussion with Kevlin Henney . Today I wrote such a class, and was very pleased with it as it reduced a lot code which was repeated in a number of methods down to a single line of code - it even manages a resource! Here's the code I started with: try {     final OutputStream os = response.getOutputStream();     try     {         IOUtils.write(JsonTools.toJson(...), os, "UTF-8");         ...