Paul Grenyer

What: NorDev: Software in the City & CoffeeScript is for... When: Wednesday, May 7, 2014 @ 6:30 PM Where: The King's Centre, King Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH Sign-up: http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/167058832/ Software in the City: the real story Burkhard Kloss ( @georgebernhard ) The news is full of tales of trillions of derivatives being traded in global financial centres. This talk will give an insight - with thinly veiled anecdotes, and possibly some humour - of how the software behind these trades really gets developed, and what it's like to be in the thick of it. Burkhard has been writing Software in the City of London for longer than he cares to mention these days. Starting in C++, but occasionally venturing into Python, Java, .Net and sometimes VBA (but we don't talk about that), he has seen the good, the bad, and a lot of the ugly side of what really happens in "The City". CoffeeScript is for...  Anders F...

by Alastair Reynolds ISBN: 978-0575090453 Fantastic! I loved this book. I really struggled to put it down and was reading it at every opportunity. I was even reading it for the three minutes it took to microwave my lunch at work each day. It’s great not to have to start my review saying that this book is excellent, but not as good as Revelation Space, because it is, although it’s not as broad in terms of the scope of the story. Unlike Blue Remembered Earth , you’re straight into the action with On the Steel Breeze and there’s none of the slow character building. It sits so well on the foundations created by Blue Remembered Earth that I wish I’d gone back and read it again first. I also liked all the characters this time. There’s a great sense of mystery right up to the end. Most science fiction stories based around a paranoid machine intelligence remind me of HAL. However, HAL was a well intentioned, mislead child. Arachne, at least the version of her integrated into the...

MobeDevCon 2014 , Norfolk’s Mobile Development conference, will take place on Wednesday 9th July at the Kings Centre in Norwich. As a sponsor this is an ideal opportunity to get exposure to around one hundred mobile devs and decision influencers from the Norfolk area and beyond. Please take a look at the sponsorship packages below and if you would like to sponsor, please email mobdevcon@nakedelement.co.uk . Tickets for MobDevCon 2014 are onsale now from £80 plus fees on eventbrite . Associate £300 Mention on twitter Logo on website Logo on slide in opening presentation Partner £800 Mention on twitter Logo on website Logo on slide in opening presentation Table & space for a small banner at the conference Lunch and refreshments for person manning the stand Elite £1500 Mention on twitter Logo on website Logo on slide in opening presentation Table & space for a small banner at the conference Lunch and refreshments for pe...

What:  Test Driven Development (TDD) in Ruby When: Wednesday, 23rd April at 7pm. Where: Further, The Old Church, St Matthew's Road, Norwich, NR1 1SP Sign-up:   http://www.meetup.com/Norwich-Ruby-User-Group-NRUG/events/174652322/ This month I will will be leading a workshop on Test Driven Development in Ruby: Most of my experience with Ruby has been creating Rails apps using the command line engine and plenty of help and advice from people like Matthew Wells, my co-director at Naked Element Ltd. How a vanilla Ruby programme hangs together and especially how you use Rake to build one has been quite opaque to me. When NRUG asked me to do a session on Test Driven Development (TDD) in Ruby I saw this as an ideal opportunity for this to change.  Concentrating on testing outside of a Rails context, Paul will be covering the setup and structure of a testable Ruby program, and will demonstrate how you can write your own tests. To take part in the worksh...

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...