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ISSUE 04
FEATURING VIEWS, REVIEWS AND INTERVIEWS FROM IN AND AROUND THE NORFOLK AREA, NTJ IS NORFOLK’S PREMIER TECHNICAL JOURNAL FOR TECHIES, BY TECHIES.
NORDEVCONSPECIAL ISSUE
FACEBOOK IS NOT A SOCIAL PLATFORM
MEET PAUL RUSSELL
HOT SOURCE
NORDEVCON PROGRAMME
NORWICH ISN’T A PROPER CITY
FEBRUARY 2014
COMMUNITY | EVENTS | COMPANY SPOTLIGHT | NORDEVCON | SPEAKERS
DIGITALEDITION
the online solution
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Email [email protected]
norfolktechjournal.com
The Norfolk Tech Journal is distributed online and in print, every month.
2 Meet Paul Russell4 Meet Hot Source5 EVENT: Node School6 Silicon Broads7 NorDevCon Intro8 NorDevCon Programme9 Speaker Profiles18 ip21: Intellectual Property Blog21 NorDevCon Workshop: Cyber Dojo
So here we are nearly twelve months on from the hugely successful SyncConf, the first conference of its kind to be held in Norwich. The February Agile and tech conference baton has been passed from SyncNorwich to Norfolk Developers and now is Norfolk Developers’ time to shine and shine it will. In the pages of this issue of the Norfolk Tech journal you will find all the details of the Norfolk Developers Conference (NorDevCon), the Virgin Wines reception and the conference dinner. In terms of content it is already Norfolk’s biggest tech event. Now it just needs people like YOU to come along and enjoy what is guaranteed to be a fantastic day. You will also find details of how to buy a ticket.
You’re holding in your hands (or reading online, etc) the fourth issue of the Norfolk Tech Journal. I don’t remember when the idea for the Norfolk Tech Journal popped into my head. It will have been sometime in 2013, but I am not sure when. The first posts started going onto the website in late August and have continued at a rate of at least one new post every working day. That’s in the order of 21 posts a month (minimum). The contributors to the Norfolk Tech Journal have been very generous – thank you all!
The first and second PDF and printed journals were published in early November and early December respectively. The third one, a Rainbird and TechCrunch
From the Editor// PAUL GRENYER
“It’s hardly surprising that pretty much everyone has heard of Silicon Valley.”
This issue:
EDITORSCaroline HargreavesIndi DebahMick SchonhutLucy MorrisBeccy Johnston
WEB PUBLISHERAkshata Javalirao
WEB MASTERDom Davis
DESIGNERSChris J. BennettShelley Burrows
COVERRobin Silcock
PRINT DESIGNAC Digital Studio
INTERVIEWERSGreg HolmanIndi DebahBeccy JohnstonSteve Hunter
COLUMNISTSJulie BishopSean ClarkScott RangerBruce Cairns
MARKETINGSean ClarkPaul Gosnell
PRODUCTION EDITORChris J. Bennett
THE TEAM
special was published in early January. The biggest problem is always deciding what not to include in the printed version to keep the printing costs down while we find advertisers to help pay for printing and production.
The NTJ has come a long way in a short period of time, but there is further to go. To really put Norfolk on the technology map we need more! More visits to the website. More downloads of the PDF journal. More recipients of the paper journal. More advertisers. More writers. More editors. More web publishers. More wordpress/PHP developers. A project manager would be very useful as well! If you would like to get involved in the Norfolk Tech Journal, please drop me an email to:[email protected].
As Darren Cook pointed out recently on google+, the NTJ has an extremely willing and able team behind it and it just would not have happened without: Akshata Javalirao, Beccy Johnston, Boydlee Pollentine, Cat Landin, Jane Chittenden, Julie Bishop, Mick Schonhut, Paul Sparkes, Robin Silcock, Scott Ranger, Sean Clark and Shelley Burrows (if I’ve forgotten you, rest assured your contribution is greatly appreciated!).
Extra special thanks go to Caroline Hargreaves, Dom Davis, Geraint Williams and Chris J. Bennett. The NTJ just wouldn’t have got this far without you.
Visit us online at: norfolktechjournal.com @NorTechJournal
22 NorDevCon Workshops: F# and Spock26 NorDevCon Sponsors27 Standard Contracts28 Norwich Isn’t a Proper City29 The Importance of Self Learning30 Facebook Is Not a Social Platform32 The Soapbox: Paper Prototyping33 Advertise with Norfolk Tech Journal
ISSUE 4 MenuVisit us online at: norfolktechjournal.com
Meet Paul Russell
Community Review/Event
Speaker Profiles
The Importance of Self Learning
Silicon Broads
Workshop: Cyber Dojo
Advertising with NTJ
Meet Hot Source
I.P Blog Part Two
Facebook Is Not A Social Media Platform
NorDevCon Introduction
NorDevCon Sponsors
Event: Node School
Workshops: F# and Spock
The Soapbox: Paper Prototyping
NorDevCon Programme
Norwich Isn’t A Proper City
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Article
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Standard Contracts
ISSUE 04 February 2014
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Who do you work for?That should be a simple question, right? The most direct answer to that is Smart421, a UK-focused consultancy and systems integrator based in Ipswich (I know!). Because it’s a consultancy though, I only work there 1 day per week, and the remaining four days per week, I work for our clients, most recently Aviva (who I have a long history with – first working for them as a permie in 2001-2005).
Because that’s not complicated enough, I also run a startup, 3sixty (www.get3sixty.com) in my spare time.
What do you do there?At Smart, I own the integration propositions. That means working out what the future holds for hard-core enterprise integration, so that we can help our customers deliver better, more reliable solutions faster. For most enterprises, this will mean RESTful integration and public APIs over the next 5 years or so, so I’m busy understanding how to weave that into a set of propositions our customers can and will buy from us.
For Aviva, I work as a solution architect, effectively working out how to wire systems together to solve some kind of business problem, preferably without it costing the GDP of a small nation.
At my startup, I’m chief cook and bottle washer. I do the design, write the code, support the customers. A very different experience from the day job, which is at least part of why I do it!
What experience, qualifications etc were important in getting the job?You’ll have to ask my boss, Smart’s CTO Robin Meehan. I think it was probably a combination of some reasonably good stories to tell about integration in large companies, some equally strong views about what good integration looks like, coupled with an ability to both listen and talk to people, including people who don’t bleed 0s and 1s.
The other thing that I’m not sure directly helped me get the job, but almost certainly indirectly contributed more than almost anything else. I love learning. Reading. Watching. Listening. I remember reading about Amazon EC2 back in late 2007/early 2008, and saying to Robin “that’s going to be massive, we need to be on that train”. He was already thinking the same thing. We’ve both been following it slavishly ever since, and Smart are now arguably the leading AWS partner in the UK for enterprise customers.
What do you like most about the job?Two things, really:
One: People. In my job, I meet and work with a lot of them. Meeting several new people a week on average. The vast majority of them I get on with. And even those I don’t naturally gel with, I kinda enjoy the challenge.
Two: Little successes. I like it when I come up with an idea, particularly a simple idea, and it just works.
What’s the most challenging thing they’ve had to do (eg complex coding; impossible deadline)?The most challenging thing? Kids. Hands down.At work? Probably two things:
Politics: Managing the competing expectations, dreams and desires of a collection of demanding stakeholders while remaining productive, honest and sane is non-trivial.
Time management: Juggling competing demands from multiple stakeholders, projects and clients in an environment which rarely maintains clear priorities for long means my todo list is constantly on the move, and things are often off the table as quickly as they arrive. This makes identifying and focusing on the single most important thing hard. I’ve got better at it, but it’s still something I try to work on every day.
Paul Russell
Meet the Community
@paulrussell http://www.linkedin.com/in/pauljrussell
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norfolktechjournal.com
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How do you keep up to date with what’s new?RSS for specific blogs that I follow, Twitter for sucking up the tech ambiance and Zite (a news aggregator app – very good!) for keeping up with general tech news from sites that I don’t follow closely.
If you could go back and do it again, would you still chose the same career path?Broadly? Yes. I love technology, and I just don’t think any other career would have fitted me as well. Contrary to my childhood dreams, I’m not an astronaut, and never will be.
Given my time again, I’d probably have focused on companies for which IT is the business, rather than enterprises, which often see it as a cost centre. The reality is that for the vast majority of companies today, regardless of their size, to a large extent their IT is their business, whether they see it that way or not.
What is your platform of choice?Apple all the way. Switched from Windows to Linux at age 17, then from Linux to MacOS X when I realised that life is too short to re-compile your kernel every five minutes.
What is the best ever platform?Is that a trick question? For what purpose? Mainframes were pretty cool in their day. Toasters are awesome for warming bread.
If I had to choose, I’d probably say the gestalt entity that is *nix. It runs on everything from mainframes to smartphones, to Raspberry PIs. To this day, it underpins the Internet, and is therefore arguably the major foundation of contemporary human communication. Pretty cool for something first invented in the 60’s. AWS comes a close second though, if we’re allowed to count that as a platform.
When you’re fixing a production problem, who goes on your iPod?For some reason lost in the sands of time, Chicane’s Far From the Maddening Crowds. There’s something about the sound and progression of that album that helps me focus. I use it in the office sometimes too if I need to get something done in a hurry.
What gives you a nerdgasm?Amazon Web Services. Quite simply the most amazing example of what a little ingenuity can bring. Revenues are expected to be 3.5bn this year. I remember thinking about what it would take to build something like this when I was at university. I had the wrong idea though: I wanted to use spare compute capacity in existing data centres. It didn’t even occur to me that there would be companies that had enough compute capacity on their own to kick off this kind of revolution.
What do your family think of what you do?They think I’m nuts, and work too hard. That’s the ones that understand what the heck I do in the first place. The others just think I get paid too much to fix computers.
How long have you been in technology?My dad worked in an office with a Mini-computer and thought it was A-M-A-Z-I-N-G, so he went out and bought a 16K spectrum when I was about 5. Not long after that, I started working with quick basic, and eventually progressed to C, then C++, then Java, and more recently Ruby. I did a bit of VBA in the middle, but I don’t admit that in public.
Do you have any personal pet projects you’d like to tell us about?Absolutely. I run 3sixty (www.get3sixty.com), which is a service that allows you to gather anonymous feedback from your team to help you develop. We all have things we’re good at, and things we need to work on (heaven knows I do!), and 3sixty helps you work out which things are which, and get help on how to improve.I’m working at the moment on creating an ability to create public profiles with your feedback, as a supplement to your CV. Saying “I can do X” on your CV is nowhere near as compelling as showing three years worth of feedback detailing exactly why you are good at it, and what you still need to do to get even better.Please, go sign up, and tell me how you get on!
How do you see your part of the industry changing in the next 5 or 10 years? Cloud. Everywhere. SAAS will be the first choice for non-differentiating systems (e.g. bug trackers, e-mail etc), and IAAS or PAAS for the heart and soul of your business. Everything will be integrated with restful services. The most successful companies will use small focussed teams of high-end developers. I bet you a (shared) fiver all of that happens.
What is the most surprising thing about you?I’m shy.
PS/Xbox/PC/other? Mac.
Favourite computer game? Ever? Horace goes skiing? Oh, seriously. Probably the Half-life franchise.
Are you in Norfolk by accident or design? Accident, although I kinda like it here. Came to university, never left.
What’s good/challenging about operating in Norfolk? It’s so damned far from anywhere except Amsterdam. I’ll be in the queue for the Norwich/London Hyperloop once Elon Musk has finished messing around with electric cars and rockets.
...The most successful companies will use small focussed teams of high-end developers...
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
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We get together on the last Thursday of every month. Normally we’ll organise short talks where speakers will talk about important or interesting subjects. We’ll then post the videos online so that they can be seen and shared amongst the widest possible audience. In the past we’ve had a diverse mix of speakers across a wide range of industries from design and creative agencies to engineering and financial services. Topics have included apps, accessibility, connected TV, user experience and even zombie films and emotive art exhibitions. New for 2014 is the Hot Source ‘makie’, every other month we will be meeting to do or make something! We are kicking of with anelectronics event on Thursday February 27th, a challenge with the brilliant ‘Little Bits’ kit followed in April by a screen printingsession at STEW. We’ve also organised two hack events, one looking at Near Field Communication (NFC) and the other 3D printing. These events ran over a number of weeks and involved teams experimenting with the potential uses of the new technology with some fantastic results. We had 3D printed giant knitting needles, a working ‘anti-gun’ from students at NUA and an NFC enabled Grand National betting service. One app from the NFC hack that provided a one tap connection to Wi-Fi waspatented and turned into a full time business that is now working with Telefonica! Have a look the Hot Source website to find out more. You can also follow Hot Source on twitter: @hsnorwich.
Everyone is welcome to join Hot Source and all the meetings are free to attend. We hope to see you at an event soon!
ARTICLEROWENA MASKELL
Meet
@hsnorwich
Hot Source is a meet-up group for creative and digital people in and around Norwich, Norfolk. Our aim is to create a community which shares ideas and experience to help digital creativity grow and flourish in the area.
http://hotsourcenorwich.co.uk/
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NODE SCHOOL: NODE.JS HALF DAY HANDS ON WORKSHOP
What
When
Where
Node School: Node.JS Half Day Hands On Workshop
Tuesday 11th March 2014 @ 12.30pm - 16.30pm
King’s CentreKing Street, Norwich, NR1 1PH
http://www.meetup.com/Norfolk-Developers-NorDev/events/158375062/
£15.00
Learn node from scratch with a fun, hands-on workshop.
You will work through practical and fun tutorials on your own laptop with the help and support of experienced Node.js developers. The lesson will comprise of several exercises for you to complete at your own pace. No previous node experience is required, but some familiarity with JavaScript would be helpful.
Richard Astbury @richorama
Richard helps software businesses around Europe migrate their applications to the cloud. Richard is a Microsoft MVP for Windows Azure, an experienced Node/js and .NET developer, and Senior Consultant at two10degrees. He lives in Woodbridge, Suffolk.
norfolktechjournal.com
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
Despite sounding like a group of ladies after undergoing a procedure, Silicon Broads is a term I coined a while back for the significantly growing technology sector in Norfolk.
As we don’t have a roundabout or a fen, the broads seemed a good focus.
I registered the domain in July and wanted to use it for a job listings site as I was recruiting for my own startup Everpress (everpress.co.uk) at the time. However, after the talk around clusters with Mike Butcher at the Techcrunch Norwich event I realised there are actually a tonne of technology companies in Norwich I don’t know much about and decided that the term might be put to better use. I knew some of the popular ones (Blurtit, Liftshare, Proxama, etc.) but I had no idea there were so many young startups.
The map is growing all the time and I want to turn it into the best place to find the technology companies in Norwich and what they are working on. At the moment we have two types of pins. Services are in blue and startups in Orange.
Silicon BroadsARTICLEMATT DAVEY...
If we take, for example, my startup - we are six months old and plan to offer a whole host of services and tools to the technology crowd in Norwich, but before SyncNorwich or Techcrunch no one in Norwich knew we existed. We launched our first product after two months and have two more in beta along with two great open source projects.
I want to make siliconbroads.co.uk a place where you can find these companies and discover what they are up to. I can hear the startup owners cringing over one more thing to update, but I think it would be awesome to embed your last tweet featuring the #siliconnorwich on the map pin. This would mean that you could look at Everpress on the map and see we have a new beta out.
You’ll also notice on http://siliconbroads.co.uk and http://haberdash.co there’s a made in Norwich badge. This is something I really feel should be a badge of quality in the local sector, so I have set up http://madeinnorwich.co.uk. Go there, download the logo to include in your next project and show the world you are proud to work in Silicon Broads.
For anyone anxious to try this and a number of other improvements out let me know at [email protected]; any feedback is always welcomed.
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The Conference Dinner
The conference dinner will be held at the venue in the evening, following the conference. In this unique experience the speakers remain seated while the conference attendees move round between courses. This is your opportunity to speak to your favorite speakers of the day. The price includes three courses and two glasses of wine per person. There will also be a bar.
Last year the conference dinner was one of the highlights of the conference and sold out! Please make sure you purchase your dinner ticket at the same time as your conference ticket.
The Virgin Wines Reception
Virgin Wines will be hosting a reception at the venue between the end of the conference and the start of the conference dinner. As well as a glass of wine courtesy of Virgin Wines there will also be a bar. Places are limited so please make sure you get your free Virgin Wines reception ticket at the same time as your conference ticket.
The Venue
The King’s Centre is a high quality conference venue in the centre of Norwich with 14 different rooms to suit individual requirements. The centre offers conference rooms, meeting rooms, breakout rooms and a 650 seater auditorium.
nor(DEV):conTHE VENUE:The King’s CentreKing Street, Norwich NR1 1PH
WHENFriday 28th February
nordevcon.com Tickets available online
Naked Element Ltd. is proud to present NorDevCon, the Norfolk Developers Agile and tech conference in the heart of Norfolk.
NorDevCon will take place on Friday 28th February 2014 at the Kings Centre in Norwich. Building on the hugely successful Agile and technical tracks from last year’s SyncConf, NorDevCon will also feature a Cloud & Big Data track, a workshop track and a combined local speaker and SyncDevelopHER track.
norfolktechjournal.com
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
8:30am // Registration
9:30am // Opening Keynote - Software Apprenticeships: This Time It’s Personal
10:30am // Coffee Break
4:45pm // Coffee Break
5:00pm // Closing Keynote - Building SOLID FoundationsNat Pryce & Steve Freeman
5:45pm // Conference End
6:00pm // Virgin Wines Reception
7:00pm - 10:00pm // Speaker’s Dinner
Tech
Continous DeliveryChris O’Dell
LevelDB + Node.jsRichard Astbury
Agile & Mobile - Do They Work Together As Well As They Sound?Phil Nash
All your types are belong to us!Phil Trelford
Applied API DesignJon Skeet
The Architecture of UncertaintyKevlin Henney
Agile at Unruly MediaRachel Davis
The Microsoft Cloud OS Data platformAnthony Saxby
Building for Rainy DaysMatthew Revell
Rethinking Application Design for the CloudCyrille Le Clerc
Pulp prototyping Harry Harrold & Rupert Redington
Sex, Death and Saving Lives Samantha Parnell
Going Loopy - Iteration in GoEleanor McHugh
Agile maturity - avoiding the ‘process trap’Janet Randell
10 years of Doing Behaviour - Driven Development All WrongLiz Keogh
PDD The Other SDLC Dom Davis
HerokuPete Roome
Let Me Graph That For YouIan Robinson
Transforming Enterprises with AWS CloudChris Turvil
CyberDojoJon Jagger
Hands On Machine Learning with F#Phil Trelford
Spock, the Testing Framework of ChoiceRussel Winder
OrleansRichard Astbury
Building Next-Gen Enterprise Mobile ApplicationsBoylee Pollentine
TBCTBC
10:45am
11:30am
1:30pm
2:15pm
3:15pm
4:00pm
Agile Big Data & Cloud
Workshop SyncDevelopHER& Local Speaker
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Software Apprenticeships: This Time It’s Personal
There has been much talk about apprenticeships for software developers, but between employers, academia and practitioners we’ve struggled to find a model that works for proper long-term apprenticeships.
After nearly a decade of personal research into the problem, I’m embarking on my first apprenticeship with Computer Science undergraduate Will Price, applying an experimental model where experienced practitioners like me coach and mentor young programmers directly.
In this presentation, I’ll outline our simple apprenticeship model and the experience we’re having with it, as well as discuss the wider problems of long-term software apprenticeships, and how our model might let us finally have our cake and eat it.
@jasongormanhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/jasongorman
Jason Gorman
Opening Keynote
// speaker profiles
60 mins
nor(DEV):con
Speaker Profile:
Jason has worked with teams at the BBC, City Index, Electronic Arts, Higher Education Statistics Agency, BUPA, British Standards Institute, The Post Office, Merrill Lynch HSBC, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Orange, Lloyds TSB, AOL, Reed Business Information and Symbian, any many more.
Jason chairs the Software Craftsmanship conference in the UK, and is a contributor to other conferences including QCon, Software Practice Advancement, XPDay, Agile Finland, JAX London and CITCON Europe.
His web site, parlezuml.com, has been visited by more than a million software professionals since 2003, and his free tutorials on use cases, UML, OO design and Test-driven Development have had more than 500,000 downloads.
norfolktechjournal.com
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
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Building SOLID Foundations
Why can’t we just add a feature to our system without tearing the code apart or, worse, patching around it? It ought to take just a few lines. We know the code is supposed to be modular and coherent, but too often it just doesn’t turn out that way.
We don’t believe it should be this hard to change object-oriented systems. We’ve seen examples where it really is that easy to add a new feature. The difference seems to be in the intermediate level structure. The design principles that most programmers rely on don’t address the middle ground where the complexity lies. We know about principles and patterns at the small scale, such as SOLID, and
Speaker Profiles:
Nat Pryce is a co-author of Growing Object-Oriented Software Guided by Tests. An early adopter of XP, he has written or contributed to several open source libraries and tools that support TDD and was one of the founding organizers of the London XP Day conference. He has worked as a programmer, architect, trainer, and consultant in a variety of industries, including sports reportage, marketing communications, retail, media, telecoms and finance. He has delivered systems ranging from embedded devices to large compute farms supporting global business.
Steve Freeman, author of Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided by Tests (Addison-Wesley), was a pioneer of Agile software development in the UK. He has developed software for a range of institutions, from small vendors to multinational investment banks. Steve trains and consults for software teams around the world. Previously, he has worked in research labs and software houses, earned a PhD (Cambridge), written shrink-wrap applications for IBM, and taught at University College London. Steve is a presenter and organiser at international industry conferences, and was chair of the first London XPDay.
@natpryce
@sf105http://www.linkedin.com/in/stevefreeman
Nat PryceSteve Freeman
Closing Keynote45 mins
the large scale, such as REST. We’re less familiar with the structures in the middle.
This talk is about design principles that we’ve learned help us develop mid-scale code structures that are easy to read and easy to change. At the lowest level, this means well-known patterns such as avoiding globals and following SOLID guidelines. At larger scales, this means assembling those SOLID objects to avoid hidden coupling so that the system as a whole is amenable to change. We focus on how objects fit together and communicate, and on being clear about how capabilities and information flow between objects in the running system.
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Agile & Mobile - Do They Work Together As Well As They Sound?
AGILE: 45 mins
Most discussion of agile practices and processes seem to assume a context of desktop applications or web or server-based systems. They also tend to imply an enterprise context that colours the way priorities and expectations are set.
The early days of mobile were characterised by a “hack it and see” mentality and, to this day, agile practices see less adoption in the mobile space than in the enterprise. But the times they’re a changing. As mobile becomes more mainstream we need to take a good hard look at whether the currently popular agile practices are appropriate. Which practices work well? Which ones need tweaking and which ones are just wrong or irrelevant?
This session is meant to be a discussion starter. We’ll look at some specifics derived from some of my own experiences - and others I have talked to. But this is a bigger subject that needs more attention.
The focus will be technical, but including design and user experience. Where we look at specific technical examples we’ll be using iOS, but the majority of the material is platform agnostic.
Speaker Profile:
Phil has spent much of the last three decades trying to work out how to transform percussive actions on a keyboard into patterns of electrical pulses that seem to make some people happy. Along the way he has discovered that sometimes you need to get other people involved too and generally tries to hang out with those that care about the craft as much as he does. Outside of contract work, consulting, training and coaching he has authored open source projects such as Catch (a C++ & Objective-C test framework) and several iOS apps. If you’re not careful he also speaks at conferences and events.
All your types are belong to us!
TECH: 45 mins
Big Data tasks typically require acquiring and analysing data from a wide variety of data sources, visualizing the data and applying a barrage of statistical algorithms. This talk will show how this can be accomplished in Visual Studio on Windows or Xamarin Studio on Mac and
Linux using F#’s REPL and Type Providers.
Type Providers give typed access to a wide range of data sources from CSV, JSON and XML to SQL, OData and Web Services, instantly without a code generation step. The Type Provider mechanism can also be used to analyse data with direct access to statistical packages like R and MATLAB as well as all the existing .Net libraries.
Finally visualizations can be generated using F#’s desktop charting libraries, or with ASP.Net and even JavaScript libraries like HighCharts.
Expect a sprinkling of anecdotes drawn from experiences working on large machine learning systems at Microsoft, and plenty of live demos.
Speaker Profile:
Phil Trelford is a Software Developer and Architect at Trayport, a market leading supplier of energy trading systems. He’s a regular speaker, trainer, blogger, open source author, co-organizer of the London F# Meetup and Microsoft MVP.
@phil_nashhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/phil-nash/0/563/546
@ptrelfordhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/phillip-trelford/1/784/797
Phil Nash
Phil Trelford
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
Continuous Delivery at 7digital - An Experience Report
TECH: 45 mins
An introduction to Continuous Delivery, it’s purpose and benefits, and how we achieved it at 7digital. An overview of the technical and people changes we made, and the impact these had - both good and bad, followed by a “A Day in a Life of a Change at 7digital”.
Speaker Profile:
Chris O’Dell is a Lead Developer at 7digital, one of London’s premier digital download companies, where she heads up the API team. She has nearly ten years experience working on the back-ends of web based services, primarily in .Net, most recently focussing on Web APIs.
Chris has a keen interest in Test Driven Development, Continuous Delivery and Agile development practices. She lives in London and in her spare time has begun learning to play the Cello.
Applied API design
TECH: 45 mins
It’s all very well seeing toy examples of API design where only snippets are required, but what does a good API look like in a complete application?
In this live coding session, Jon will be applying his love of all things immutable, separation
of concerns and other design goodness to a certain well-known shape-dropping game. We’ll explore different approaches - including ones from the audience - as we go along, but end up with a clean model which works equally well when using WPF, a console-based view... or playing by email. Unlike some other sessions where Jon has shown some truly horrible, unreadable, twisted, evil code the aim here is to end up with an example of elegance and beauty. That doesn’t mean we can’t visit a few evil notions along the way, of course...
Speaker Profile:
Jon Skeet is a Java developer for Google in London, but he plays with C# (somewhat obsessively) in his free time. He 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. Jon lives in Reading with his wife and three children.
@ChrisAnnODell http://www.linkedin.com/in/christineodell
@jonskeethttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/jon-skeet/0/800/ba3
Chris O’Dell Jon Skeet
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The Architecture of Uncertainty
TECH: 90 mins
Ralph Johnson defined architecture as “the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other”. Given our inability to tell the future, how can we design effectively for it? Much
project management thinking is based on the elimination of uncertainty, and advice on software architecture and guidance for future-proofing code often revolves around adding complexity to embrace uncertainty. In most cases, this is exactly the opposite path to the one that should be taken.
The talk looks at how uncertainty, lack of knowledge and options can be used to partition and structure the code in a system.
Speaker Profile:
Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites, including Better Software, The Register Application Development Advisor, Java Report and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know book.
Agile maturity - avoiding the ‘process trap’
AGILE: 45 mins
Description: In the early stages of Agile Transformation it is all too easy for organisations, particularly large enterprises, to fall into the trap of seeing Agile as just a new process to follow. In this session, Janet will use
her experience of Agile transformation at Aviva to describe some of the common pitfalls, together with strategies that can be used to avoid them.
Speaker Profile:
Janet Randell has been the driving force behind the Agile transformation in Aviva UK General Insurance since early 2010 and is now the lead Agile SME in the Aviva global Agile transformation programme. Janet has worked in IT for more than 20 years and is passionate about breaking down organisational barriers to improve the effectiveness of software delivery. She has been involved in the enhancement and application of IT development processes throughout much her career, with previous roles including Methods and Tools support and management of the Architecture and Design team for UKGI.
@KevlinHenneyhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/kevlin
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/janet-randell/4/728/416
Kevlin Henney Janet Randell
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
XP at Unruly
AGILE: 45 mins
Unruly is the leading global platform for social video marketing. Founded in 2006, we now have 11 offices and employ over 125 people globally including Germany. We’ve been applying eXtreme Programming (XP) from the start and that’s still a core part of how we develop
our software products. As our company and customer base has grown, we’ve had to figure out how to shape user stories and make plans with stakeholders spread across US and Europe. We also have grown our tech team so we can continue to develop new product offerings with rich user-experience while improving our underlying infrastructure to handle a growing amount of traffic and data. Come to this session to hear about how we use XP and where we’ve had to make adjustments to adapt to scale.
Speaker Profile:
Rachel is co-author of the first “Agile Coaching” book and works as Agile Coach at Unruly Media, the leading global platform for social video marketing. Internationally recognised and presenting at industry conferences worldwide, Rachel started out working as a software developer and has been an agile practitioner since 2000 applying a range of agile methods including XP, SCRUM, Lean/Kanban, and DSDM. Follow Rachel on Twitter:@rachelcdavies.
10 years of Doing Behaviour-Driven Development All Wrong
AGILE: 90 mins
10 years ago, Dan North first came up with the idea of BDD: using examples in conversation to explore the behaviour of systems, then carrying those examples into code. Since then, we’ve learnt a lot about how
BDD works, how it works best, and how it can fail horribly! Even the most experienced BDD practitioners have learnt a lot from their failures... but what were they? And how are we failing now?
In this talk, Liz takes a look at things we said back then which we shouldn’t have; ways in which we abused BDD more than we used it; and things that we’re still doing all wrong today. Come along to see the mistakes, listen to the stories, and hear the apologies!
Speaker Profile:
Liz is an experienced Lean and Agile consultant and well-known international speaker. Coming from a strong technical background, her work covers a wide variety of topics, from software development and architecture to psychology and complexity thinking. She is best known for her involvement in the BDD community, and was awarded the Gordon Pask award in 2010 for deepening existing ideas in the space and “coming up with some pretty crazy ones of her own”.
@rachelcdavieshttp://www.linkedin.com/in/racheldavies
@lunivorehttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/liz-keogh/1/7/624
Rachel Davies Liz Keogh
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norfolktechjournal.com
PDD The Other SDLC
AGILE: 45 mins
PDD, or Panic Driven Development, isn’t what you’d consider to be a mainstream Software Development Lifecycle, but it’s out there, and it’s adoption is surprisingly high. Scarily, most teams don’t even know they’re using it.
It doesn’t matter if you’re Waterfall or Iterative, RAD or RUP, Agile or Lean, you almost certainly use some elements of PDD. In moderation this can be A Good Thing™ but too much PDD can kill a project, and left unchecked it can kill a company. To make things worse, many people think they’re implementing Agile techniques when all they’re doing is embracing PDD and all that’s wrong with it.
This session aims to highlight the characteristic elements of PDD, allowing teams to spot where they’ve drifted away from Agile, and helping them avoid the pitfalls of PDD in the future.
Speaker Profile:
Dom Davis heads up IT at Virgin Wines and has been an avid Agile practitioner for well over a decade. A veteran of PDD teams he’s now helped pull two companies out of the PDD trap and put them on their way to being productive members of the Agile community.
LevelDB + Node.js
TECH: 45 mins
When LevelDB met Node.js it sparked a new way of thinking about databases. Rather than the traditional approach of selecting a complete database system, with Level you plug together the modules you want, to create the database you need. You make your own choices
around replication, consistency and functionality. This talk will include an overview, and some practical demonstrations with live-coding databases.
Speaker Profile:
Richard helps software businesses around Europe migrate their applications to the cloud. He works with a wide variety of companies, ranging from the smallest startups to the largest software businesses in the world, and specializes in moving applications that were never designed to run in the cloud, utilise the Windows Azure platform. Richard is a Microsoft MVP for Windows Azure, and Senior Consultant at Two10degrees. He is often found developing open source software in C# and Node.js, and lives in Suffolk with his wife and two children.
@idomdavishttp://www.linkedin.com/in/domdavis
@richoramahttp://www.linkedin.com/in/richardastbury
Dom Davis Richard Astbury
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
Product Prototyping with Heroku - The Validated Ship!
BIG DATA & CLOUD: 90 mins
Pete has spent the last 7 years working for web agencies and has come to the conclusion that one of the cheapest, most productive ways to develop a new project is through prototyping. Prototyping
provides quick validation of our assumptions (we’ve all made them) and aids the creation of meaningful products that your customers actually want!
We’re blessed as developers; there are more tools to help us prototype than we can shake a mucky stick at: backend frameworks, frontend frameworks and new plugins blogged about everyday. However, there is one tool Pete won’t deploy without: Heroku - a cloud based hosting platform. Heroku allows Pete and the Beta Hive team to turn local hacks into live, functioning products with little to no effort.
This talk will document the Beta Hive prototyping process, how they validate their assumptions and most importantly how they deploy their products.
Speaker Profile:
Pete is a Developer at Beta Hive (http://betahive.com) a Product Development agency based in London. He is currently working on Pingle - a mobile app for meeting people and making new friends. Pete previously worked for a startup in Paris before co-founding PANDR Web Design & Development in Norwich. Pete is also a Developer at The 405, a leading online Music & Culture Magazine.
The Microsoft Cloud OS Data platform
BIG DATA & CLOUD: 45 mins
The Microsoft Cloud OS Data platform enables hi performance, insight rich solutions to be delivered securely across private, hosted and public cloud infrastructures. This session will cover the new
capabilities being delivered in SQL Server, SQL Server PDW and HDInsight in the first half of 2014.
Speaker Profile:
Anthony is responsible for the Information and Data platform business for Microsoft UK. This role covers the product marketing and business management for Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft HDInsight and Microsoft Biztalk Server. Anthony has been at Microsoft for 19 years and prior to his current role was Practice Manager for Microsoft’s Architecture and Planning consulting team. Anthony has 25 years experience in the software and IT Services industry and has worked on large projects in Retail, Financial Services and Government, covering application areas ranging from B2C Commerce solutions in the Financial Services industry through to large scale Integration projects in the Government sector.
@zoltarSpeakshttp://www.linkedin.com/in/peteroome
@anthonysaxbyhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/anthony-saxby/0/466/4
Pete Roome Anthony Saxby
Want to advertise here?
Email [email protected]
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norfolktechjournal.com
Let Me Graph That For You
BIG DATA & CLOUD: 45 mins
Graphs are one of the best abstractions we have for modelling connectedness. Graph databases, in turn, are one of the best tools at our disposal for modelling, storing and querying complex, densely-connected data. Today, graphs and graph databases are helping solve
some of the world’s most challenging data problems, in domains as diverse as search, social networking, recommendations, datacentre management, logistics, entitlements and authorization, route finding, network monitoring, and fraud analysis.
In this session we’ll take a peek inside the graphista’s toolbox. We’ll look at some common graph data structures, and the graph database queries that unleash the insights buried inside them. We’ll survey some of the tools and techniques you can use to graph your world, experiment with graph data, and apply it in your own applications. And we’ll draw lots of circles and lines. We might even colour some of them in.
Speaker Profile:
Ian works on research and development for future versions of the Neo4j graph database. Harbouring a long-held interest in connected data, he was for many years one of the foremost proponents of REST architectures, before turning his focus from the Web’s global graph to the realm of graph databases. As Neo Technology’s Director of Customer Success, he has worked extensively with customers to design and develop graph database solutions. He is a coauthor of ‘Graph Databases’ and ‘REST in Practice’ (O’Reilly), and a contributor to ‘REST: From Research to Practice’ (Springer) and ‘Service Design Patterns’ (Addison-Wesley). He blogs at http://iansrobinson.com, and tweets at @iansrobinson.
Rethinking application design for the Cloud
BIG DATA & CLOUD: 45 mins
Let’s discover the new application design guidelines to succeed on the Cloud. We will not only cover the glamorous new concepts for scalability, high availability and new keys to productivity but also the new security constraints, legal challenges, costs models or reversibility rules.
Session Explanation Cloud is everywhere: It is no longer used exclusively by famous startups or elite teams such as DropBox or NetFlix. Brick and mortars businesses such as newspapers and even banks now use Cloud Computing! However, these success stories did not happen by chance. Having infinite resources, servers, memory or storage is not a silver bullet. Let’s discover the new application design guidelines to succeed on the Cloud. We will not only cover the glamorous new concepts for scalability, high availability and new keys to productivity but also the new security constraints, legal challenges, costs models or reversibility rules. We will cover with a live demo: • AvailabilityandscalabilitywithCloudBeesJava PaaS and Amazon AWS • Cloudservices:thenewbuildingblocksfor applications • Security,legalissues,pricingandreversibilityon the Cloud
Speaker Profile:
Cyrille is Elite Architect at CloudBees with more than 12 years of experience in Java technologies. He came to CloudBees from Xebia where he was CTO and Architect. He was an early adopter of the “You Build It, You run It” model that he put in place for a number of high volume web sites. He naturally embraced the DevOps culture as well as Cloud Computing which he implements for his customers. Cyrille is very active in the Java community as a the creator of the Open Source project embedded-jmxtrans and as a speaker at conferences.
@iansrobinsonhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/ian-robinson/2/567/a8a
@cyrilleleclerchttp://www.linkedin.com/in/cyrilleleclerc
Ian Robinson Cyrille Le Clerc
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
● Patents
● Trademarks
● Licensing
● Design Rights
● Litigation
● Portfolio Management
● IP Valuation
● IP Budgeting
A specialist Intellectual Property company that
moves with the times
Tel: +44 (0) 1603 457008 Norwich
Tel: +44 (0) 2033 271310 London
www.ip21.co.uk
At ip21 we pride ourselves on offering a full range of IP services, as well
as IP advice and support tailored to the commercial benefit of our clients.
IP21 IOD mag full page ad 3.indd 1 08/08/2012 13:59
In this month’s Intellectual Property Blog for Norfolk Tech Journal I will be looking at the journey of Nick D’Aloisio, a famous success story from the world of tech start-ups who managed to invent, protect, raise investment for, develop and then ultimately sell his “Summly” app all before his 18th birthday!
Summly is a news summarisation service that analyses stories from a number of sources and condenses the information into a couple of sentences. If the user is interested in the summary, they can click through to the original article and read the whole piece.
Summly’s predecessor was an app called Trimit which D’Aloisio created in March 2011 for iOS, and which was featured by Apple as a new and noteworthy application. The potential of Trimit also caught the attention of Hong Kong billionaire and serial investor Li Ka-shing who gave D’Aloisio $300,000 in venture capital funding. D’Aloisio used the consumer feedback from Trimit, as well as the financial investment, to completely re-design the application and prepare for its re-launch as Summly.
As part of this process Nick also used his investment to protect his innovation by filing a patent application entitled a “Method and apparatus for automatically summarizing the contents of electronic documents” which can be viewed by searching for: WO/2013/066497. He filed his patent in October 2011 and re-launched the app as Summly in December 2011.
With his patent protection securely in place, D’Aloisio successfully raised a further round of investment of $1,000,000 from a number of investors including Ashton Kutcher and Stephen Fry to continue to develop and update the app. With the extra funding in place he recruited a number of new staff and collaborators, and began commercial negotiations with a number of news organisations, including Rupert Murdoch and others.
In March 2013, after around one million downloads, 90 million summaries read, and having received Apple’s Best Apps of 2012 award for ‘Intuitive Touch’, it was announced that Summly was to be acquired by Yahoo for a sale of around $30million, making D’Aloisio one of the youngest ever self-made millionaires at just 17 years old.
His story is certainly remarkable and not without its fair share of luck, especially given the narrow time frame in which he went from concept to sale. But he believed in his idea, invested in protecting and developing it and devoted the hours, days and years required for him to achieve his objective. Far from taking time out and spending his money he now plans to do it all over again, hopefully many times in his lifetime.
As he himself says, “In the Summly version of what I do in the next 20 years, this will only be the first half sentence.”
Intellectual Property Blog for NTJ:Part Two
How a simple idea became
$30,000,000
ARTICLE RICHARD JONESBUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER FOR IP21
[email protected] 457008
...Summly was to be acquired by Yahoo for a sale of around $30million, making D’Aloisio one of the youngest self-made millionaires...
“
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norfolktechjournal.com
● Patents
● Trademarks
● Licensing
● Design Rights
● Litigation
● Portfolio Management
● IP Valuation
● IP Budgeting
A specialist Intellectual Property company that
moves with the times
Tel: +44 (0) 1603 457008 Norwich
Tel: +44 (0) 2033 271310 London
www.ip21.co.uk
At ip21 we pride ourselves on offering a full range of IP services, as well
as IP advice and support tailored to the commercial benefit of our clients.
IP21 IOD mag full page ad 3.indd 1 08/08/2012 13:59
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
Building for rainy days
BIG DATA & CLOUD: 45 mins
If we are going to build data-intensive business on top of cloud services, we need to prepare for the inevitable: usually some part of the system we build will be in a state of failure, often silently. Trouble is, we all want to rely
more and more on huge amounts of data. What do we when that data goes away thanks to some flaky cloud service? By embracing the inevitability of failure, we can build resilient distributed systems that cope gracefully when things suddenly disappear and allow us to make use of the huge amounts of data the world throws at us. In this talk, I’ll look at strategies and techniques for building systems that rely totally on massive amounts of data and cope with the failures that come from relying not just on cloud services but computing generally.
Speaker Profile:
Matthew Revell is a Technical Evangelist at Basho, the company behind the Riak distributed database. He has been part of team’s building services that were too reliant on single points of failure and now spends his days speaking to engineers about how they reduce their reliance on database technology that was designed for a single-threaded world.
Transforming Enterpriseswith AWS Cloud
BIG DATA & CLOUD: 45 mins
AWS provides revolutionary opportunities for those who can take full advantage, but what happens when this exciting and fast-moving technology comes up against typical enterprise challenges and inertia?
This session will cover:
• BriefoverviewofAWSservices,capabilitiesand use cases• Walk-throughofreal-worldarchitecturesand example deployments from enterprise customers• Issuesencounteredandlessonslearnt• People,process,andtechnologyconsiderations for successful cloud adoption
Speaker Profile:
Chris Turvil is the AWS Practice Manager for Smart421 – an AWS Premier Consulting Partner offering cloud consultancy, development and support services. He is a principal consultant and Enterprise/Solution Architect with practical experience working in a variety of technical disciplines.
Chris has a proven track record successfully delivering large projects for both the public and private sector, particularly within Financial Services.
@matthewrevellhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewrevell
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/chris-turvil/4b/444/49a
Matthew Revell Chris Turvil
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Cyber-Dojo
WORKSHOP: 90 mins
Created by software consultant Jon Jagger, cyber-dojo is the world’s simplest non-development environment! In a cyber-dojo you practice by going slower and focusing on improving rather than finishing.
What is cyber-dojo? cyber-dojo is an online browser-based coding dojo. Each group:
• writestheircodeandtestsinsideawebbrowser• pressestheirrun-testsbuttontosubmittheir code and tests to the cyber-dojo server• theserversavesthesubmission,runsthetests, and returns the test-outcome to the browser as a traffic light• redifoneormoretestsfailed• amberifthetestscouldnotberun(egsyntax error)• greenifallthetestspassed• adashboardshowsthetrafficlighthistoryofall groups. Click on any traffic light to open a diff-view of that submission.• startanewpracticesessionfromanydiff-view
Why cyber-dojo? Jon built cyber-dojo to promote deliberate practice of test driven software development, team dynamics and collaboration. Jon strongly believes that if you practice coding using your normal development environment then you are likely to be drawn into an unhelpful “completion” mindset.
@JonJaggerhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/jon-jagger/0/b4/158
Jon Jagger
Find out more here: http://jonjagger.blogspot.no/p/cyber-dojo_2380.html
Read about Cyber-dojo here: http://www.masteringagilepractice.com/
Try it out here: cyber-dojo.com
Speaker Profile:
Jon Jagger is 2E years old (hex). He’s loved software since he was 10 (dec). He runs his own software consultancy specializing in practice, people, process, agility, test driven development, and complex-adaptive systems-thinking. He built cyber-dojo.com to promote deliberate practice for software developers. He’s worked with Accenture, Aviva, Cisco, Ericsson, Friends Provident, HP, Microsoft, Opera, Ordnance Survey, RBS, Reuters, Renault F1, Schlumberger, Tandberg and many many more. If you don’t like his work he won’t invoice you. He’s the ex ECMA TG2 C# convenor. He’s married to the beautiful Natalie, and proud father of Ellie, Penny and Patrick. He loves freshwater river fishing. He live in Somerset, England. On twitter he’s@JonJagger.
cyber-dojoWorkshop / Participation in CyberDojo requires a laptop per pair. Please bring your own laptops.
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Workshops / F#Spock
ISSUE 04 February 2014
Hands On MachineLearning with F#
WORKSHOP: 90 mins
This session will introduce basic Machine Learning concepts with a practical exercise using sample data from Kaggle. No prior knowledge of either Machine Learning or F# is required.
To get the most from the session please try and bring a laptop along with F# installed.
Installing F#:
• UseF#onWindows• UseF#onMacOSX• UseF#onLinux
Speaker Profile:
Phil Trelford is a Software Developer and Architect at Trayport, a market leading supplier of energy trading systems. He’s a regular speaker, trainer, blogger, open source author, co-organizer of the London F# Meetup and Microsoft MVP.
Spock: the test frameworkof choice
WORKSHOP: 90 mins
JUnit, a derivative of sUnit, was the unittest framework of choice with Java for many years. Then came TestNG and changed the scene: testing was about integration and system test as well as unit testing.
With behaviour-driven development (BDD) augmenting test-driven development (TDD) more development of test frameworks became necessary. There are a number of Java frameworks for this but Spock, which is a Groovy-based system, knocks them all for six.
Because Groovy is a dynamic language that works with the Java data model, it is symbiotic with Java. Spock can therefore be used for testing mixed Java and Groovy systems.
In this session we will explore what Spock can do and why it is the Java testing framework of choice.
Speaker Profile:
Ex-theoretical physicist, ex-UNIX system programmer, ex-academic. Now an independent consultant, analyst, author, expert witness and trainer. Also doing startups. Interested in all things parallel and concurrent. And build.
Actively involved with Python, Groovy, GPars, GroovyFX, SCons, Java, and Gant. Also Gradle. And Python-CSP. Seriously interested in Ceylon, Kotlin, D, Go, Rust.
My stance on testing: it isn’t optional. Spock, py.test, Catch, etc. are your friends.
@ptrelfordhttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/phillip-trelford/1/784/797
@russel_winderhttp://www.linkedin.com/in/russelwinder
Phil Trelford Russel Winder
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Sex, Death and Saving Lives
SyncDevelopHER: 45 mins
Sam Parnell runs Measured Brilliance, a small development agency specialising in building responsive websites. As a female, working in tech Sam will be talking about running a startup and explaining why she thinks women are essential to the web to give a balanced
perspective. Based at the Atrium Studios, at UCS, Ipswich, she also runs a startup, Echoleft.
What started as a comment about choosing music to play at a funeral has become something special, Echoleft, an end of life preparation and memorial platform. Running a startup is never easy and running one focussed around death adds another layer of complexity but she’s taken up the challenge of making something great to transform the memorial industry.
Like many startups Echoleft is being built using a lean methodology, and currently it’s overall aim is to provide a clear, easy to use web based service. The product is designed to allow users to tell their story and make their wishes clear to their families, friends and death care professionals. It will give families the opportunity to remember and celebrate a loved one while raising awareness of memorial events and fundraising for charities.
So far it’s been an interesting journey which has stretched Sam and the team to find extensible solutions and engaging ways to encourage people to get involved and chat about about their own death and the deaths of those they have lost.
The journey is ongoing and Sam will be sharing the highs and lows of running a startup, explaining where she thinks their small team has shone and what she’d do differently next time.
@Doolallylasshttp://www.linkedin.com/pub/sam-parnell/38/826/1aa
Samantha Parnell
Going Loopy: Iteration in Go
SyncDevelopHER: 45 mins
An exploration of Go’s flexible **for** construct, starting with the most basic C-like semantics and building through type assertion, closures, channels and reflection to demonstrate the basics of generalised iteration.
This talk is suitable for moderately experienced developers and does not require a deep familiarity with Go.
Speaker Profile:
London-based hacker Ellie has a passion for the esoteric corners of programming stretching back to her misspent teenage years. During the course of her career she’s worked on mission critical systems ranging from avionics to banking security and now devotes her time to writing digital romances in Ruby and Go. As a responsible parent she enjoys polyhedral dice, home brewing and gothic music.
Eleanor McHugh
@feyeleanorhttp://uk.linkedin.com/in/eleanormchugh/
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
Orleans
LOCAL SPEAKER: 45 mins
Known for underpinning the Halo 4 server-side components, Orleans offers an actor based approach to programming for the cloud. This simplifies the programming model by removing shared state and thread safety concerns, and unlocks the potential for huge
horizontal scale out. Orleans is a great fit for online computer games, but is also applicable in other areas, from business applications to the Internet of Things. The talk will be an overview of the architecture, and a live coding demonstration.
Richard has had early access to the technology, which is not currently publicly available.
Speaker Profile:
Richard helps software businesses around Europe migrate their applications to the cloud. He works with a wide variety of companies, ranging from the smallest startups to the largest software businesses in the world, and specializes in moving applications that were never designed to run in the cloud, utilise the Windows Azure platform. Richard is a Microsoft MVP for Windows Azure, and Senior Consultant at Two10degrees. He is often found developing open source software in C# and Node.js, and lives in Suffolk with his wife and two children.
Building Next-Gen Enterprise Mobile Applications
LOCAL SPEAKER: 45 mins
In this session, Boydlee will describe how the next generation of enterprise mobile applications are being built, and how you can compete with the big boys by utilising new technologies such as MBaaS,
Push, Cloud Servers and Augmented Reality to build large, scalable systems without the overheads. This session will include topics such as:
• WhatisMBaaSandchoosinganMBaaSsolution • UsingCrossPlatformmobiletoolssuchas Appcelerator Titanium • Understandingbasicserverinfrastructure required for fast scaling • Easilybuildanddeployserverinfrastructureusing Rackspace
Speaker Profile:
Boydlee has over 12 years experience working in software from small roles working in very early .NET through to building systems for major banks and governments. He switched to primarily developing for mobile devices in 2009 and has presented numerous times at the JavaScript and mobile conferences around the world from London, Paris, Spain and the USA to Australia, and is a long time supporter and evangelist for the Appcelerator Titanium platform. He now runs a small digital agency in Norwich called Tipsy & Tumbler, and additionally is the organiser and founder of tiConf - a Titanium developers conference that spans Europe, the USA and Australia Pacific.
Richard Astbury Boydlee Pollentine
@richoramahttp://www.linkedin.com/in/richardastbury
@boydleep http://www.linkedin.com/pub/boydlee-pollentine/5/190/557
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Pulp Prototyping
LOCAL SPEAKER: 45 mins
If good Agile coding means showing working software early, then testing your thinking before you’ve even opened an IDE is even better.
Agile development means small steps, tested early and often. That means conversations, but without something to talk about, they can just wander. At the beginning of a project, code is too slow to produce something to spark that conversation. Even wireframes can take time, and obscure interface detail. That’s where a paper prototype is most useful. It’s not a sketch, it’s working paperware.
Part stand-up, part demonstration, part evangelism, this session will spread the joy of really, really, low fidelity prototyping in software development. Harry and Rupert will turn up with a paperware system to choose which sessions you’re going to go to at a conference, and a lucky attendee or two will be intimately involved in cutting that idea around...
Speaker Profile:
Rupert began working with the Internet and open source technology in 1998, bringing skills from previous careers in theatre and education. He’s a semi-compulsive neophile, with a gluttonous reading habit, and plunders the world for better ways of making marvellous software. Harry remembers the last dot-com boom, and left the US technology company who bought his start-up out when they asked him to move to Texas. After a long break, he started really learning again in 2007. He believes empathy is a key skill for developers and designers, or as he says “If you care about the people who’ll use the software you’re creating, it’ll be better software.”
Rupert RedingtonHarry Harrold
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
/ SPONSORS
nor(DEV):con
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ARTICLE BRUCE CAIRNSRumbo Limitedwww.rumbo.me
In this article I’m going to explain why you, as an I.T. business, should have a template supply contract.
It’s possible for a contract to be formed verbally, or by piecing together communications between the parties (typically emails). This is a very bad idea. The law will imply some terms where there’s no written agreement, but other important terms would be missing altogether (such as limitation of liability, which I’ll cover in a future article). The main reason for using a written contract is – fairly obviously – to ensure certainty for both parties.
What’s in an I.T. Contract?The deliverables for I.T. deals are very diverse and specialised. They can include consultancy, managed services, software licensing, software as a service (SaaS), hosting, software/web development, supply of hardware, support and maintenance – and many others. All of these need different approaches, and often a combination of them.
I.T. contracts often involve project terms, including development, acceptance testing, installation, implementation and configuration. Software contracts usually need provisions for updates, new versions and support. Intellectual property rights provisions are very important, including licensing. There will often be service levels and service credits, and perhaps technical/functional specifications. More complex contracts often deal with matters such as governance, business continuity and disaster recovery, exit planning etc.
Then there are the terms that are typically needed in any commercial contract, including price and payment, length of the contract, termination rights, warranties, data protection, limitation of liability, dispute resolution, and some relatively standard but important terms usually referred to as “boilerplate”.
Bespoke, not one size fits allAs you can see from those lists – which are drastically simplified – putting together a supplier’s standard contract is not an off-the-peg exercise. Each I.T. business is different, and will need a bespoke approach to produce a contract that suits its business needs. For example, I’ve recently reviewed dozens of standard service schedules for one supplier client, including co-location, hosting, connectivity of different kinds, VOIP services, supply of hardware, infrastructure as a service, managed backup, managed LAN, and many others. These are used in conjunction with a template master services agreement, so that the right contract can easily be assembled for the exact mix of services being supplied to the customer. At the other end of the scale, I drafted a short supply agreement for an I.T. business that provides web development and hosting services, with a simple order form on the front and terms and conditions attached.
THE I.T. LAWYER BLOG
I.T. BUSINESSES AND STANDARD CONTRACTS
Don’t copyDon’t make the mistake of searching online and copying someone else’s contract. First, you’ll be in breach of copyright. Second, it won’t suit your business, it may be badly drafted, and it may contain mistakes and stupid problems that will annoy your customers (such as very one-sided clauses or poor structure).
When acting for customers I see small UK suppliers sending out “their” contract which is obviously lifted from a US website and designed for use under US laws – changing the governing law clause from California to England doesn’t alter the fact that it was designed for a different legal system! I also see templates that are bought online as off-the-shelf legal agreements – they’re often shockingly bad, as well as not fitting the supplier’s business. It’s like buying a cheap and badly made off-the-peg suit with the trousers up to your armpits and the jacket down to your knees. But unlike a bad suit, a bad standard contract is a business risk.
Contracting decisionsWhen an I.T. deal is agreed, a quick decision has to be made – will the supplier’s or the customer’s standard contract be used? If you, as the supplier, don’t have a standard contract, that’s probably the end of the discussion! Very often a customer’s contract turns out to be very generic, not suitable for the deliverables, and one-sided. They’re designed to protect the customer, not you. They may contain terms that you’d prefer to avoid, such as audit rights, benchmarking, wide customer termination rights and step-in rights. They often try to assign your intellectual property rights to the customer, in a way that is completely inappropriate and would damage your business. They usually don’t take open source software into account at all – and I’d bet a lot of the readership of NTJ use OSS.
If you can give the customer your standard terms, which are well balanced between the parties (not taking strong pro-supplier positions) and clearly suit the deliverables, the agreed commercial arrangements and current I.T. contracting norms, you’re more likely to have a happy customer and a quick and efficient contract negotiation. You’ll also enhance the efficiency and value of your business – but that’s for a later article.
One final tip – as a supplier, never start work or provide deliverables until the contract is signed, however tempted or pressurised you are. This often has an unhappy ending.
I’m always interested to hear of any issues you think it would be helpful for me to cover in future articles – perhaps get a conversation going on Twitter @lawyer_IT
ABOUT BRUCEBruce Cairns is an Associate Director with Rumbo Limited, based in London and working from his home in Norfolk. You can find out more about Rumbo, and about Bruce, at www.rumbo.me, and you can get in touch with him using the contact page on the Rumbo site.
The information in this article is for guidance purposes only, and is not a substitute for taking legal advice.
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
Back in 2012, I decided that Norwich should have it’s own Social Media Week.
It was being held in other cities across the world and I thought why not here in Norwich?
A few of us got together: Sara and Chris Greenfield from Bright Yellow Marketing, Lynsey Sweales from SocialB, Bridget Greenwood from Financial Social Media UK, Jim Drew from BizRev and myself.
We decided to put on free workshops to help people use social media to propel their businesses. They learned how to connect to a global audience, hold webinars, create communities, attract and source new business. We showed job seekers how to connect with employers and we showed students how to showcase their projects using the different platforms and much more.
Our goal was to be accredited by the global organisers, however we never got accreditation, we were told, “They didn’t consider Norwich to be a proper city”.
I don’t think they realised that Norwich is most definitely a city and used to be the second largest city in England, with only London being bigger. Soon after we were turned down for accreditation, Norwich became England’s first UNESCO City of Literature.
You may wonder why it’s taken me until 2014 to write about it. Well I wasn’t very happy about it, let’s just say that.
There were two reasons why I wasn’t very happy:
Reason number 1: Norwich IS a proper City!
Reason number 2: The people in Norwich use social media very well.
ARTICLEJULIE BISHOP
In 2012, Claire Martinsen, Sarah Pettegree and I with our Norfolk businesses were nominated for #SBS100 - Social Brands 100 - The Oscars for brands in the social age. The previous year Sarah was one of the winners! The type of companies that we were competing with were Heineken, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Money, BetFair, Avon Cosmetics and Audi, just to name a few.
Norwich is a hub for YouTubers: we have the famous Tanya Burr who brought Covent Garden to a standstill when she announced she was going to be there:
http://www.edp24.co.uk/news/how_norfolk_s_youtube_sensation_tanya_burr_caused_chaos_in_london_s_covent_garden_1_2217174 and the Pixiwoo sisters with over 1million subscribers:
http://www.youtube.com/user/pixiwoo My Jobhop Blog has just been voted into the top 100 blogs by Birds on the Blog and the Pixiwoo blog was number 5 of the UK’s Top 10 Beauty Blogs.
People from Norwich used Facebook to campaign for the Alan Partridge film, Alpha Papa, to be premiered here in Norwich first rather than Leicester Square, and won! Norwich was also featured globally when Redbull tried to bully our local brewery Redwell and everyone went mad on Twitter!
#CoolNorfolk has also trended on Twitter because it’s a cool place to live and The Guardian Newspaper thought so too and gave 8 reasons why.
These are just a few ways we use social media well and there are many more.
If you agree with me that Norwich is a proper City and that we do use social media well then I’d love to hear your comments.
Our video of Social Media Week Norwich:
http://youtu.be/kHbikdgq5J4
Norwich isn’t a proper City!
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I’m a big believer in the discipline of self learning and self teaching. A large amount of my own knowledge is the product of self learning which I’ve accomplished in my own time. Learning academically and professionally is only half of the story.
Being a keen programmer, last summer I decided I wanted to explore some additional programming languages, rather than just Java which I’m currently learning through university. I chose to start learning the basics of Python and Perl using various online resources available. Although not strictly a programming language, I also took a crash course in using regular expressions which has benefited me greatly.
So why am I such a big believer in self learning? Well it comes down to both personal development and career development. For me, learning other programming languages has allowed me to see different ways of doing things as well as appreciating how different languages are applicable to certain problems. There’s often bias around programming languages, whether it be for or against them. Personally, I try to keep an open
ARTICLESCOTT RANGER
mind and believe all programming languages have their place in certain situations. Without exploring the surrounding territory in your area of interest, it can be easy to not always see the full picture.
As for your career, having evidence of self learning, and in turn self motivation is an extremely valuable asset to have, which a lot of employers will instantly pick up on. A little while ago I went to see a careers advisor at my University and took in a copy of my CV. The advisor instantly picked up on the fact I had Python and the Django web framework written on my CV. I was intrigued as to why she picked out those skills rather than any of the rest. She informed me that she had been at a computing graduate fair recently and had a conversation with a few of the recruiters about the lack of graduates with skills in Python and Django. Having additional but relevant skills on your CV is a great way to get recognised and to stand out from the crowd.
Finally, and probably most importantly; I don’t just self learn in my own time solely with the hope of extending my career aspects, but because I enjoy it. It allows me to spend time doing what I enjoy, as well as being productive at the same time.
Ultimately, if you’re passionate about what you do and you want to learn more as well as furthering your future career aspects, self learning may be a tool you wish to utilize.
The importance of self learning
It allows me to spend time doing what I enjoy, as well as being productive.
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ISSUE 04 February 2014
When we talk of social media Facebook often comes up as a prime example, but is it really? Or has it morphed into yet another content platform and become a publishing company?
Loathed or loved, there is no getting away from the fact that it can play an important part in your marketing. Companies gravitate towards it due to the big audience numbers it’s associated with, 24 million active users in the UK alone. They dip their toe in, give it a try and are often disappointed with the lack of traction they get.
Facebook Has Changed, A Lot!To say something has changed so much in such a short amount of time is often hard to comprehend. In business we are used to plans, years of investment and hard work to get things off the ground.
In the social space the businesses are being modelled as much by the end users as by the people running them. Just because you want to take your business in one direction, doesn’t mean your users will want to go there.
Then we have the fact that social users are typically earlier adopters. They join a platform in its infancy, play for a bit, and then they’re off, looking for the next shiny object to play with.
What We Know About Facebook:
• Ithas1.15billionmonthlyactiveusers• Earlyadoptersprobablymovedon• Itsbusinessmodelhaschanged• Itisahardplatformonwhichtogain traction
The Large User BaseThe size of the user base here usually means we have entered maturity in terms of the platform. Yes it is evolving still, but at a much slower rate.It means we have time to figure things out, find out what works for us and how to leverage the platform for maximum effect for the long term. It also means that every other business is competing for that end user attention time.
Facebook isn’t disappearing off the edge of the Earth just yet!
ARTICLESEAN CLARK
Early Adopter FactorIf your product or service relies on early adopters you’ll probably want to look elsewhere. The psychology of early adopters and the influence they can have on new products is probably best for another post. But if you have a product that is “way out there” and ahead of its time, Facebook may not be the place for you.
A product that is disrupting an existing market may get good traction from a targeted Facebook audience segment. Something that may be worth looking at if this is you.
Changing Business ModelFacebook needs to make money. Like any other business it needs revenue to survive.
When it was in its growing phase Facebook could give everything away for free. It needed to test, and test quickly. Which post formats worked best? What kept users attention the longest? How did they react from approaches from different companies?
To learn from this and learn quickly it needed volume. Therefore it allowed early business users a lot of freedom and gave them far more visibility free of charge too.
Now Facebook have learned the lessons they needed, grown the brand and a massive audience, now is the time they can ask us to pay to reach it!Advertising is prevalent and competition high. To reach our audience effectively it is going to cost us money. After all, Facebook needs to reward its shareholders now.
Facebook Isn’t A Social Media Platform Anymore
Contrary to mainstream media reports, Facebook is a long way from dead.
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Gaining TractionIn the “good old days” getting attention on Facebook was “relatively” easy. In fact other media outlets were always looking for an innovative Facebook story to report.
Innovation on Facebook is rare nowadays, and the only news coverage you’re likely to get is through misuse of the platform.
The way in which your content is displayed and delivered to those that have “Liked” your page has changed. Algorithms are used to determine how much voice you get, and if your content isn’t “Liked” enough it will get less and less visibility.Whether Facebook like it or not they are becoming less and less a social network and more like a content publisher. Their users consume millions of screens worth of content a day, much of it at the “Daily Rag” level.
The end user attention span is fleeting, short quips, funny images and video are the order of the day. It is not the place for deep discussion and meditative thinking!
make the winning move...call 01379 330330
What This All Means For YouIf you want to reach a large established user base. If you can develop fun and engaging content. Know your audience well, and can take advantage of Facebook segmentation. If you have an ad budget, even a small one, then Facebook could well be the platform for you. If not, your time and effort may be best spent elsewhere.
There’s A Lot Of Life in The Old Girl YetContrary to mainstream media reports, Facebook is a long way from dead.
Teenagers may be leaving in droves, but they are being replaced with a far less fleeting audience, older consumers with money to spend.
I am certainly no Facebook fan boy, but there is a place for the platform in every B2C based business and even most B2B based ones marketing plans. It is a mature market that demands respect and an understanding of its end users. It also requires time to leverage well, there are no quick wins here.And if you really do want to hangout with the in crowd you can always give Snapchat a try, if you can find anyone to play with!
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PaperPrototypingIf good agile coding means showing working software early, then testing your thinking before you’ve even opened an IDE is even better.
Agile development means small steps, tested early and often. That means conversations, but without something to talk about they can just wander. At the beginning of a project, code is too slow to produce something to spark that conversation. Even wireframes can take time, and can obscure interface detail. Graphic design mock-ups are worst for this: they’re moments in time incarnate, and tend to inspire conversations about colours and layout when the user journey through an interface isn’t yet worked through. This is where we find a paper prototype is most useful.
Paper prototyping uses a hand-drawn vision of how an interface might work as the starting point for rapid improvement. It’s the best method we’ve found for co-designing digital products. It’s not a sketch, it’s working “paperware”. Paper prototyping fits most importantly into a discovery phase, where fastest iteration of ideas is most useful, but we also use it later for thinking about interface elements in development.
We take paperware everywhere. Most usefully, out to test with real people who’ll really use the software we’ll build, but also to other people working on the project.
One of us plays the part of “the computer”, the person helping us test the prototype imagines it is a real digital tool. Their finger is the mouse: when they click, we reflect that click in the prototype. Maybe they’ve clicked on a navigation element, and we’ll added an overlay to the prototype to reflect that. Maybe they’ve clicked on a “next” button, and we’ll move them on one stage in a process we’re developing.
At every stage, we stress that it’s the paper artefact we are testing, not them. Any difficulties they find using the interface are our fault as designers, not theirs.
Feedback is fast. There’s much cutting and sticking during this process as their thoughts and ideas can change the look and feel of the prototype right there and then. It’s paramount, and very satisfying for them, to see they are having such a direct influence on the future of the product. Not every change makes it in, of course.
We believe a key advantage of paper prototyping is that people feel more relaxed about challenging the design. It does not have a polished look, it’s clearly not finished, so it is obviously mutable. We have found that the personification of the computer by a real person, who consistently acts in a self-deprecating fashion, reassures the person helping us test the prototype. It helps make it clear that we are there to listen to them, and that we’ll listen to their feedback.
There’s no barrier between developers, designers, business analysts, product owners, and the people who’ll use the digital product later. Everyone has made things from cardboard and sticky tape, and everyone can see there’s nothing there they couldn’t change. Paperware inspires people to be actively involved in the testing process, rather than being the passive subjects of a demonstration. It gives us permission to be terribly, dreadfully, wrong about an interface without it costing too much time. We don’t promise to make every change, but we promise to listen, and be inspired by what people feel.
Of course, paper prototyping isn’t all we do to define how a product should work. After we’ve prototyped, there’s still business analysis to be done to ensure the logic behind the interface is understood, and what integration work is required from whom. However, in our experience, time spent on prototyping is very cost effective. It’s far quicker than building a test interface with code, rapid change is very easy and it inspires productive conversation.
Got a particular bugbear? Something that really gets your back up? Maybe something you just want to shout about and let the whole world know. The Soap box is a virtual platform where you can vent, inform or educate with your choice of evocative topic, just don’t expect everyone to agree with you, this is IT after all.
Join in the debate; your comments on the Soapbox column are welcome. And if you want the chance to have your say on Soapbox, email:[email protected]
TheSoapbox
// HARRY HARROLD
ISSUE 04 February 2014
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