Paul Grenyer

As NorDevCon continues to grow and attract higher numbers of attendees, we began to consider running the conference over two days. To find out if this was something the tech community would be interested in, we conducted a survey of NorDevCon 2015 visitors. We were very pleased to see that two thirds of the 93 respondents would like to see NorDevCon happen over two days. The majority of those surveyed would prefer Thursday and Friday to any other combination of days, with Friday and Saturday morning coming in second, head and shoulders above the other options. Based on this feedback and the direction we would like to take the conference, we have decided to run a number of parallel, hands-on workshops on the Thursday and the regular conference on Friday, with a keynote followed by five streams on the Saturday morning. We are very pleased to announce that Michael Feathers is joining us from the US to give the opening keynote on Friday, as well as running a wor...

Nor(DEV):con is now less than three weeks away and with over 240 delegates its going to be bigger than ever before! Early bird tickets are on sale until 6pm on Friday! We have a couple of last minute announcements to make. Rodric Yates of IBM will be taking our last speaker slot. Unfortunately Stephen Flowers isn't able to join us this year but we have Ben Nuttall from the Raspberry Pi foundation taking his slot. The Mind Shift to Enterprise Mobile Rodric Yates Driving a business by putting mobile at the centre of your strategy, focussing on design, realising repeatable and rapid time to value whilst maintaining secure and robust access to back end transactional systems. Working with the wider ecosystem of citizens, consumers, design agencies, vendors, VC and academia to delight and surprise. About Rodric: Professor Rodric Yates is Mobility Business Development Leader at IBM United Kingdom and Ireland, leading a team of subject matter experts across Software and S...

As well as Valentine’s Day, February hosts Groundhog Day, Thank a MailMan Day, Friday the 13th and most exciting of all - this year’s NorDevCon Conference hosts, Naked Element are please to bring you a series of hands-on workshops to make sure you gain as much as possible from the conference and go away confident that you’re able to implement all the techie tips and techniques you’ll learn throughout the day. Continuous Inspection Jason Gorman Jason Gorman, chair for the Software Craftsmanship conference in the UK as well as a seasoned conference contributor, has worked for some of the biggest names around. In this session Jason looks at continuously delivery and maintains that it’s not sustainable without Clean Code. Jason discusses how continuous Inspection is the missing discipline in Continuous Delivery and participants will learn how to implement Continuous Inspection using readily available off-the-shelf tools like Checkstyle, Simian, Emma, Java/NDepend and Sonar, ...

NorDevCon 2015 means business. Literally! This year we’ve added some business sessions to the conference to make sure that there really is something for everyone. Whether you’re an agile addict, a .Net aficionado or a techno-phobe, this year’s conference will benefit anyone that works in a business that uses technology, which let’s face it, these days is nearly every business operating today. Mobile Commerce: Past, Present, THE Future Neil Garner Mobile Commerce has come a long way from basic automated voice and text messaging services in the late 90s, through basic WAP services on feature phones in late 00s through sophisticated shopping apps of today. Mobile Commerce is still at early stages of evolution in western economies like the UK despite many emerging countries like Kenya using services like m-Pesa instead of cash. What will the future bring? Growth of Proximity Commerce linking digital with physical wallets… wearables… Biometrics and authentication… death of App...

Fingers, toes, legs on a daddy long legs, syllabi to a haiku and the Jackson’s - lots of important things comes in 5’s and that’s exactly how many weeks left until this year’s NorDevCon . This week we’ve taken a closer look at the conference sessions dedicated to design - it’s Design Time. Chucking it Over the Fence Creative/designer/developer relationships in a device agnostic landscape John Skinner It often used to be the case that a creative would mock-up every page for a website in Photoshop/Fireworks, working closely with the client to ensure that every word was spelt correctly, all images selected and every eventuality seemingly mapped out. All too often a bloated zip file of psds/pngs would be ‘chucked over the fence’ to a dev team to turn these into a functioning site. If they were lucky, there might be some hand-over notes! More often than not, this ‘process’ would lead to problems but today’s device-agnostic web landscape has rendered such a relationship all th...

Take your mind off Dry January and the gym and check out our next instalment of NorDevCon 2015's sensational sessions. From C# to the cloud and Docker to data and even dinner - NorDevCon has got it covered. C# 6 – the future is (nearly) here! Jon Skeet Jon Skeet, Java developer for Google in London, is self-confessed C# obsessed. Outside of his day job Jon loves writing and talking about C#, and the third edition of ‘C# in Depth’ was published in September 2013. Writing less formally, Jon spends a lot of time on Stack Overflow… where ‘a lot’ is an understatement. Give him a puzzle about how C# behaves which gets him reaching for the language specification, and Jon is a happy bunny. C# 6 is nearly upon us, and after doing the feature hokey-cokey for a little while, it’s all looking pretty stable. It’s a pretty special release, as along with the language changes themselves, there’s a whole new compiler to use – and poke at. The Roslyn compiler allows ordinary (at least,...

The decs' are down and the diets have started. But it's not all doom and gloom - there's plenty to look forward to in 2015. For starters we're just 7 weeks away from NorDevCon 2015 and here's a few more sessions to sink you teeth into. So long, and thanks for all the tests Seb Rose Consultant, coach, designer, analyst and developer, Seb Rose has been involved in the full development lifecycle, from Architecture to Support and BASIC to Ruby. Most recently he's been helping teams adopt and refine their agile practices, with a particular focus on automated testing. He answers the questions we've all been asking ourselves - Do unit tests make life better? Should we develop using test driven development (TDD)? What exactly are our customers paying for? Software development is hard. Unit testing and Test Driven Development (TDD) can make it easier, but only if done well – and that takes time. Seb explains how these practices can help your project, ...

Every year NorDevCon provides businesses around the county with the chance to show clients and customers, both existing and potential, that they've got their finger on the pulse when it comes to the latest and greatest in business technology. This year, Norwich-based accountants and business advisors, Farnell Clarke are the Elite event sponsors. Will Farnell, Managing Director describes how his business is hand in hand with technology, “ Farnell Clarke has been leading the way in cloud-based accounting for the past three years, working with more than 500 clients across the East of England and beyond. Technology is now absolutely fundamental to the way we run our business and help our clients to run theirs.  We rely completely on the talented people in the background who create the code that brings software such as KashFlow and ReceiptBank to life." Will adds “Ambitious businesses such as ours cannot hope to thrive and grow if we don’t embrace everything that techno...

Just weeks into the new year  NorDevCon 2015 is back and this year it means business. Tuck into our tech session taster take-two with more details of just some of our skilled speakers and what you can look forward to from the next NorDevCon. The Rationale For Continuous Delivery Many people working in software development spend their careers working without seeing what good looks like. Our history is littered with inefficient processes creating poor quality output, too late to capitalise on the expected business value. Dave Farley , co-author of the Jolt award winning book Continuous Delivery, raises the questions we’ve all been asking ourselves like 'How have we got to this state?' 'How do we get past it and what does good really look like?' David has been having fun with computers for over 30 years and over this time has worked on most types of software. He has a wide range of experience leading the development of complex software in teams, large and s...