Paul Grenyer

What: So you think you can lead a team? When: 27th & 28th February 2025 Where: nor(DEV):con, The Kings Centre, 63-75 King St, Norwich, NR1 1PH More Info: https://nordevcon.com/ Get tickets: https://ti.to/norfolkdevelopers/nordevcon-25 Software engineering is hard. Leading a team, as an engineer, can be even harder. Many of us are better at developing software than we are with people and feel our value lies in actually writing code. When you step into team leading, there are more people than code and your value increases. Over the last 25 years I’ve been unexpectedly dropped into team leading a number of times, but three and a half years ago I chose to do it. It took at least twelve months for me to realise I was only starting to understand what leading a software team is and what it means. Join me for some of the highs and lows of team leading and an insight into some of the things I learnt to help me be a better team lead. I can’t promise a panacea as I  still have much t...

As I’ve said before, I completely fell in love with Winterfylleth at Bloodstock one year. They played again, on the main stage, a few years later and released that performance as a live album and it’s one of my favourites. We went to Manchester to see them with ARD in 2022,  despite having already seen them at Incineration Fest the same year. This year we went to London to spend just ten minutes with them at their album launch . Only three of the band were there, so Mark Deeks kindly got the rest of the band’s signatures on my copy of the album at a band practice - what a legend! I couldn’t make the Ipswich date of the tour, so we went to see them in London. So you might say I’m a little obsessed or just a bit of a fan! We’ve been to The Dome   before to see Threshold and it’s a nice enough venue, but the accessibility wasn’t great, they only had tall stools to sit on, which my wife couldn’t manage to climb on to. So she ended up sitting on the floor. This time though, we ...

Infected Rain are one of those bands I thought I really ought to be into. A modern, European metalcore band with female vocals, what’s not to like? But I just couldn’t get on with the Ecdysis album. I persevered and when the band released a few tracks from the Time album in advance of its release, I listened, but they didn’t really work for me and I almost gave up. Then a few weeks later Time came out, I tried again and was just blown away. Not just daily listens, but multiple dailey listens. Then it was announced they would be playing at the Underworld at the end of August and a quick check revealed almost everything they’re currently playing live is from Time with a couple of older songs thrown in. It should be perfect, but, as I’ve blogged before , the sound at the Underworld can be hit and miss. Then my wife said she wanted to go and that was that! We went and it was amazing! The band hit the stage, and while the sound wasn’t perfect, still not enough guitar in the mix, it sounded ...

by James S. A. Corey ISBN: 78-0356504193 In some ways Cibola Burn is a lot like Abaddon’s Gate , it’s slow to get going. It takes about half the book, however the second half of the book is really good. One way in which it is different from the stories which precede it, is the Space Opera scope. The vast majority of the story is based on or in orbit around a single planet. For me, this means it doesn’t qualify as Space Opera. That sort of thing may not be important to you though. The new characters in the book are outstanding. Of course James Holden and his crew are central and key to the story. Chrisjen Avasarala is mostly absent again. The members of the opposing factions on New Terra are complicated and feel real. The natural order of who is right and who is wrong is constantly changing and being reevaluated. Star Wars this isn’t! I didn’t really get my head around what I think was meant to be the thought processes of the Protomolecule within the planet or how Miller interacts with...

Would you travel for over 4 hours to spend less than 10 minutes with one of your favourite bands just to get their latest album signed and a photograph? I DID! Although, someone came from Germany, so it wasn’t the longest anyone travelled. I don’t think I’ve been to an album launch signing since July 1997 when Paradise Lost played the London Astoria on a Sunday night and they opened the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street so that we could buy the album at midnight and have it signed. (Remember when album releases were on Mondays?). When the email came through that Winterfylleth were doing a number of album launch appearances and one of them was in Camden on a Friday night I immediately wanted to go. And then I panicked! I’d already pre-ordered the album. Would it be here in time? Worry not! I’ve got plenty of other albums of theirs they could sign. To add insult to injury, Mark Deeks wasn’t going to be there either. It’s Wednesday evening. I’m in Skegness with work and I get an email sa...

My wife is a massive PJ Harvery fan, but I always found her squeaky, out of tune, unable to play and talentless. And to be fair, some of her songs on some of her albums do sound like that. For one reason or another, we missed PJ Harvery at the Roundhouse in 2023, so despite never having been to Gunnersbury Park before, let alone for a gig, I was determined to get my wife to see her this time. The setup for gigs is actually quite good. It’s a relatively short walk from Acton Town and the accessibility entrance was easy to find and the process quick. There was an odd rule about only bringing bags which were A4 sized or smaller. How anyone would get the clothes for all weathers, it was also suggested you should bring, into a bag that small, I don’t know. However there didn’t seem to be much enforcement and we got in with our slightly larger bag and saw plenty of larger ones while we were there. One of the accessibility team who greeted us had a new Korn hoodie. They’d played the previous...

By Frank Herbert ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1473233812 Here ends a journey which turned out to be more stubborn determination than enjoyment. As I’ve mentioned before , I first started reading the Dune books as a young teenager after loving the Lynch adaptation of the 1980s. I didn’t complete the initial trilogy until last year (2023). Dune still stands out as the great story, but Herbert's self indulgence starts with Dune Messiah and continues through the rest of the sequels. I really don’t know why he bothered with Chapter House Dune or Heretics of Dune. They don't bring anything to the story or explain anything which isn’t covered in the initial trilogy. Idaho isn’t that interesting after Dune Messiah and Bene Gesseritt after Children of Dune. However, I do have the satisfaction of having read all six books by the original author. I could stop here, but I am told that the Butlerian Jihad by Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderson is well worth a read. Perhaps I’ll try that before consider...

When it comes to sound, the Underworld in Camden can be a bit hit and miss and tends to be more miss with heavier bands. I struggled to hear the guitars clearly for Born of Osiris last year and it was the same for both Perpetual Paradox and Phobetor , who were supporting Crypta . It’s a shame as both bands sounded reasonable when I tried them before the show. It wasn’t much better for Crypta. I could just about make out the guitars when there was a solo, but otherwise the guitars got lost in the bass and drums. Perhaps if the sound person concentrated more on the mix than volume it would be better. Despite the sound problems I could tell that Crypta were playing really well and I enjoyed it. They’re so young, it did feel a bit like watching a teenage garage band. I was very keen to see them and I love both albums. Hopefully I’ll get to again and the sound will be better. I was fortunate enough to meet the singer briefly, who was lovely, but my photography skills failed me!

By George R.R. Martin ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0007548279 If this wasn’t the penultimate book written and I hadn’t enjoyed the TV series so much I would be giving up on the book series at this point. A Feast for Crows is boring and long winded. It’s full of a lot of unnecessary descriptive detail and while there are a few exciting moments, it just drags on. This is also where the TV series diverges the most. The vast majority of this book, especially what takes place in the Iron Islands, does not happen in the TV series and, I suspect, for good reason. If, like me, you want the achievement of having read the whole series then read this book and keep going. Otherwise find something enjoyable and interesting to read.

Forgive me father, for it has been six months since my last gig. To be fair, my last gig was The Darkness and they played badly and we ended up next to some idiots in the crowd, so we left well before the end. A week or so before that was My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost at the Shepherds Bush Empire, which was superb! Tool should have been the second gig of the year, but we failed to make it to Myrkur. I’ve been to the O2 Arena multiple times, but this was only my second time in the Bourne Leisure box - this is one of the perks of working for Haven. The previous time was for the SugarBabes and the sound wasn’t great. Tonight, support came from Night Verses, an American instrumental prog band. When they hit the stage the sound was excellent from the off. I find purely instrumental bands get boring after a while, and although these guys played well, I was glad they didn’t play any longer. I first saw Tool at the Download Festival in 2003 and I wasn’t a fan then, so didn’t really get what...

I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level, what a REST API is for and how it should work, but lack a detailed understanding. I think the first thing they forget to consider is that REST APIs allow you to identify and manipulate resources on the web. Here I want to look briefly at what a REST API is and offer some advice on how to structure one, how it should behave and what should be considered when building it. I know this isn’t emacs vs vi, but it can be quite contentious. So, as  Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean said, this “...is more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules.” Resources & Identifiers In their book, Rest in Practice - Hypermedia and Systems Architecture (‎ISBN: 978-0596805821), Jim Webber, Savas Parastatidis and Ian Robinson describe resour...

James S. A. Corey ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1841499932 Abaddon's Gate takes a while to get going. About half the book to get going. It’s all new character introductions and building. The second half is more exciting, but drawn out. Chrisjen Avasarala is totally absent and I’d like to have understood more about where the ring came from and what its purpose was. I guess that’s to come. Inevitably the further divergence of the TV series from the books became more apparent. The TV series appears to have merged and changed a lot of the characters, missed out and changed a lot of the story, but brought it back to mostly the same point. Let’s hope the next one improves.  

Machine Vendetta Alastair Reynolds ISBN: ‎ 978-0316462846 Machine Vendetta is the final Revelation Space novel we’re getting and the final part of the Dreyfus trilogy and it could have been a lot better. Unlike the previous book in the series, there was only one main thread and consequently lacked a lot of the Space Opera we’re used to from Reynolds. A lot of the plot was predictable, including the Ultras coming to the rescue and Hafdis being key towards the end. There’s no real ending either. There are far too many loose ends left untied. It really felt like just one more novel to finish the authors publishing contract and it wasn’t really given the love and attention it deserved.