Paul Grenyer

The question we get asked the second most when speaking to clients and potential clients is “how much will my bespoke software cost to build?” This is extremely difficult to answer without lots of detail and even then the complexities of software development, the complexity of client requirements and clients changing needs over the course of a project make an accurate estimate challenging. For this reason, most software development companies shy away from including prices on their website. In fact we checked the websites of a number of our competitors and the closest we found was one who offers a range of fee options from fixed price to a daily rate and a couple who ask for your budget when contacting them for more information. As a client, until you get that first email response, phone call or face-to-face meeting you’re no closer to understanding how much your software will cost. Even then it may be some time before you are any the wiser. We can’t help you understand ho...

It’s no secret that I like death metal . Three of my favorite death metal bands are all from Poland. I’ve been lucky enough to see all of them at least twice individually, but never together. I’ve often wondered why they haven’t all toured together. I’ve never been to Poland either so I’d settle for seeing them all together in their home country. Decapitated Opening the show I’d have Decapitated a technical death metal band. Their style, as you would expect, is heavy and progressive. While currently the smaller and less well know of the three bands on this bill, Decapitated are growing in popularity and are poised to step into the shoes of metal titans such as Lamb of God . After getting into Vader and Behemoth I was really excited to read about another Polish death metal band and I wasn’t disappointed, especially as I also have a soft spot for progressive metal. Often with metal bands who have been around a while, their back catalogue is noisy and unpalatable. Not the c...

Express in Action: Node applications with Express and its companion tools By Evan Hahn ISBN: 978-1617292422 This is another excellent JavaScript book from Manning. It contains a great introduction to Express.js and I wish I’d read it sooner as it explains a lot of things about Express.js and how to use it, as well as the tools surrounding it and Node.js, which I had previously worked out for myself. If you’re thinking of writing a web application, especially one in JavaScript, I recommend you read this book first. The book is far from perfect. It could have been a lot shorter. There is a fair amount of repetition and the chatty style makes it overly verbose and irritating in many places.  The author tries to cover too much and goes beyond Express.js unnecessarily in a few places. However, given that, it’s still not a huge book and quite easy to read.

By Douglas Crockford ISBN: 978-0596517748 Every JavaScript developer with a pre-existing working knowledge of JavaScript should read this book. JavaScript is a powerful and varied language, but it was developed in a hurry and there’s plenty wrong with it. This book outlines the good bits of the language and highlights the bad bits and the bits you should just avoid. There’s also a fair amount about the author’s JSLint project in the appendices. This book was written in 2008 and probably needs updating. It’s hard going in places and the diagrams did little to nothing to help my understanding. I’ve come away still wondering about new and constructors, but I know I just need to review them again when I need them and it’ll get clearer.  I’m still not sure which function declaration syntax is best, but I’m not sure it matters too much.

In 2016, Venkat Subramaniam wrote an incredible book called ‘ Test-Driving JavaScript Applications ’ which, along with JavaScript tools such as Mocha, Istanbul, Prettier and Eslint, have made me fall in love with JavaScript and Node.js (well for UI development anyway). JavaScript isn’t a proper language, right? For a long time I argued not, because the tools weren’t available to develop software with unit tests, static analysis and code coverage. This has changed and now I’m starting to take JavaScript seriously, even beyond jazzing up a web based UI. I’m almost over the lack of static typing. I’m currently using Express.js , a web framework for Node.js, a lot and Venkat includes a section on testing Express.js routes in his book. They’re a bit like controllers in the Modal View Controllers pattern: router.get('/', function(req, res, next) { task.all(function(err, tasks) { res.send(tasks); }); }); Venkat’s example test looks like this: it('should register ...

Date: 9:00 am to 4:45 pm, Thursday 5th October 2017 Location: The King’s Centre , King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH Price: £50.00 per person Level:  Beginner Prerequisites: Laptop with wifi, modern browser, text editor RSVP: https://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/242461849/ JavaScript is amazing. It is a powerful, simple, infuriating, elegant and sometimes irrational programming language which was born in a hurry and can now do almost anything you can imagine. It can make whizzy websites, speak to databases, and draw maps, it can fly drones, make games, and build apps. You can run it on your watch or on your phone, on any web page or on hundreds of virtual servers. And if you’re reading this you’re probably contemplating learning it. 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...