Paul Grenyer

What:  Mainframe for Startups & Naughty and Nice advice on mobile design When: Wednesday 9th April 2014 @ 6.30pm Where:  Virgin Wines, 4th Floor, St James' Mill, Whitefriars, Norwich, NR3 1TN Sign-up: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/166258512/ Mainframe for Start-ups Colin Mower Many view the a Mainframe as big, expensive and archaic. As the Mainframe (or System z as it is known) reaches it's 50th year, you will learn in this talk how these views are challenged, and understand how it has been evolving quietly, remaining at the cutting edge of IT. System z is still as relevant today in modern computing as it was in the 1960's, and can be applied to almost any business size and need. Colin Mower has been working in IT for 17 years, joining Norwich Union as a Mainframe Systems Programmer, before moving into cross platform design and architecture. He joined IBM in 2011 as a client facing architect, and spends most of his time on Gre...

What: AngularJS in a day When: Thursday 10th April 2014, 10am to 4.30pm Where: Kings Centre, Norwich, NR1 1PH How much: £30 Sign-up: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/171910802/ AngularJS is big news: though newer than Backbone or Ember, it is already hugely more popular. Its secret is the huge productivity of its UI primitives. For example: why reinvent wheels to make a live updating list or grid when you can declaratively repeat, filter and edit with Angular's simple extensions to HTML? In this session we'll learn the core of AngularJS, demystify some of its rough edges, and peek behind the scenes to understand how it all works. We'll then build up a full single-page web application so you are ready to start applying Angular to your own projects. Tim Ruffles  @timruffles Tim is the founder of SidekickJS, a code-quality tracker for teams. He teaches & mentors developers for General Assembly and EventHandler. Previously he was...

Download This is the first issue of the Norfolk Tech Journal that you won’t be able to hold in your hands (unless of course you’ve printed it yourself). We’re making the journal purely digital for the time being to explore that channel more thoroughly and to target it at a wider audience. We’re working on a facelift for the journal and a marketing strategy that will get it in front of more people. As always, watch this space and if you can help us, now’s the time to shout. I’ve written  before  about how Agile East Anglia, the group that went on to be part of SyncNorwich  was inspired by the  Extreme Tuesday Club  (XTC) in London. Another group I’m a member of is the  ACCU  (formerly the Associate of C and C++ Users). The ACCU hold a  conference  that inspired the  Norfolk Developers Conference . The ACCU conference runs for 5 days and includes a full pre-conference tutorial day and four days with four tracks, ending on a Saturd...

I’ve been looking for a good, online continuous integration solution since late 2007. It’s useful, even as a lone developer, although running it on your development machine can be problematic, especially as back then I developed on a number of different machines and those I wasn’t using were turned off. IaaS (Infrastructure As A Service) was in its infancy then and those providers I spoke to were shocked at the idea of building and running an executable, especially as the boxes were predominantly shared. My hosting provider installed Cruise Control for me, but it never really worked.  In the end I used a spare machine at work to run Jenkins and at home I went without until I decided to buy a server and virtualise it. That worked quite well, but it took a lot of setup and the performance wasn’t great. I couldn’t afford a huge amount of memory or super fast disks. That worked sufficiently for about eighteen months until I gave the machine a good dusting internally and it ref...

Talking smarter together. The best decisions are rarely taken in isolation. They’re the happy outcome of conversation, the back-and-forth of ideas and knowledge, and keeping an ear to the ground. In the fast-flowing waters of software, it’s those ideas, that knowledge, and solid networking that can make all the difference. So why aren’t we talking? Norfolk Software Leaders brings the region's  brightest and best leaders and decision-makers together for clever conversation, smart business, and informal networking. We meet monthly for lunch at All Bar One in Tombland in Norwich. To join the group and find out what’s happening and when, visit the meetup site or contact Paul Grenyer . You can follow Norfolk Software Leaders on twitter, @NorSoftLead . Words: Indi Debah

The Monuments Men isn’t a sci-fi and it doesn’t have Keira Knightley in it, but it does have guns! So it just about meets my loose criteria for a good film. The Monuments Men is fantastic and perfectly cast. You should go and see it. There have been a lot of films for older actors in the last few years and they’re usually cheesy, entertaining, but ultimately rubbish (although I do love the expendables). It moves along at a reasonable and consistent pace throughout. As with a lot of World War II films, it starts with a specialist team being put together from soldiers and other professionals who have been put out to pasture. But unlike a lot of other films this isn’t drawn out or over detailed. There aren’t really any action scenes either, but they weren’t missed because there was a story.  The climax is quite low key too, but fits perfectly with the rest of the film.

I don’t get to SyncIpswich as often as I’d like. It’s a shame because they’re such a friendly crowd, especially when you consider I’m from across the border. Carl Farmer has been running SyncIpswich at the Eastern Enterprise Hub for ten months now and he’s doing an excellent job. There were about 30 people there to hear Jason Firth . In my experience this is a good number for a January event. Maybe it’s the weather, maybe it’s the proximity to Christmas and the New Year, I don’t know, but people just don’t seem to like coming out in January or February. Tonight wasn’t helped by the fact the venue wasn’t ready and was locked up when Carl arrived. We could see the lack of lights as we walked across from the far side of the bay. It was rather disconcerting. However when we arrived we were directed to the bar to wait, where we roughed it. It was clear from the moment he shook my hand and beamed that Jason Firth “wasn’t from round here.” Now living locally, he was at SyncIpswich to...