Paul Grenyer

Orbital: Winner of the Booker Prize 2024 Samantha Harvey ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1529922936 This book wasn’t for me. It’s a great idea, but it’s poorly realised. This is not a novel and not a textbook. I don’t think it knows what it is. It’s a bit all over the place, almost as uncomfortable to read as The Silmarillion . The characters do not distil in your mind, there’s no character building and no story. It’s over indulgent. The few serious messages it tries to get across, like climate change and world peace, have all been done by sci-fi authors for decades and done better. I don’t usually pay much attention to the Booker prize, but as Orbital sounded like a great idea and hinted at science fiction based in science fact, I thought it might be ok. It wasn’t and I am pleased it wasn’t any longer.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall Rosenberg ISBN: 978-1-892005-28-1 I was sitting in an Amazon Web Services workshop and, as an after lunch ice breaker, the workshop leader asked us to all name our latest purchase from Amazon. I had no idea what mine was and when I looked it turned out to be Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg. I grinned and announced that I had bought after a recommendation from my boss. While true, it still got the laughter I was looking for. It wasn’t, well at least I hope it wasn’t, recommended to me as I am angry or violent in my communication, but I was certainly struggling with some of the people related parts of my role as a Team Lead of a software engineering team. However, reading the book made me realise that I was struggling with: Observations Feelings Needs Requests Not just with respect to other people, but for myself as well. The book helped me use these, along with a deeper...

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...