Building on its thriving tech and startup community, SyncNorwich presents SyncConf 2013, a one-day Agile and Tech Conference in the heart of Norfolk. Syncing local and international speakers, ideas and investors; all conference profits will be donated to kickstart a local startup in a future Dragons Den style SyncNorwich event.
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.
Good product, good architecture, good interfaces, good names, good tests, good practices… good grief! So much to know, so much keep in mind, so much to do. Software development is a discipline and a domain long on recommendations and short on time. How can those involved balance all the conflicting concerns? This talk takes a step back from the busy and overpopulated world of detailed best-practice style recommendations - recommendations that come by the dozen, in fifties or as 97, to look at five considerations that can help you make sense of both the detail and the bigger picture.
Working with data is something that comes naturally to people who work in tech, but data is abstract and real people don’t like graphs. How do we communicate complex issues through data visualisation to a non-technical audience?
This talk is a condensed trip through years of turning Big Data into consumer facing products, and lessons learned visualising data for tv and press.
Chris Osborne leads Big Data products at AlertMe, for connected homes and smart energy. An expert in big data and visualisation, his teams' work has featured at TED, the BBC, Wired, TechCrunch and all the usual tech outlets. He was previously Member of the Digital Advisory Board to the Mayor of London, and advised the Cabinet Office on open data strategy.
Tackling Complex Data with Neo4j
Today's complex data is not only big, but also semi-structured and densely connected. In this session we'll look at how size, structure and connectedness have converged to change the data world. We'll then go on to look at some of the new opportunities for creating end-user value that have emerged in a world of connected data, illustrated with practical examples implemented using Neo4j, the world's leading graph database.
Ian is an engineer at Neo Technology, currently working on research and development for future versions of the Neo4j graph database. Prior to joining the engineering team, Ian served as Neo's Director of Customer Success, managing training, professional services and support, and working with customers to design and develop graph database solutions. He is a co-author of 'REST in Practice' (O'Reilly) and a contributor to 'REST: From Research to Practice' (Springer) and 'Service Design Patterns' (Addison-Wesley). He presents at conferences worldwide on REST and the graph capabilities of Neo4j, and blogs too.
The Ubiquitous Digital Map (Abridged)
Long gone are the days of walking the streets of a city with an A-Z street atlas. Whether on your laptop or on your phone, digital maps are both everywhere and in the mainstream news these days. Be they professional maps (hello Nokia/NAVTEQ and Google Maps), crowd sourced open maps (hello OpenStreetMap) or maps that doesn't work as well as intended (hello Apple Maps), we're using maps more and more with each passing year. But how did we get here? When did the digital map start being ubiquitous and the printed map less so? Digital maps have been around longer than most of us realise; this talk will tell you how and why.
A self professed geek with a life, I've had a lifelong love affair with maps since discovering the Harry Beck map of the London Underground on the back of the London A-Z street atlas at an early age. I now live in Teddington in South West London with my family and work in London, Berlin, Boston, Chicago and Sunnyvale as the Director of Web & Community for Nokia’s Location & Commerce group. Prior to Nokia, I was at Yahoo!, leading their Geo Technologies group in the UK, releasing GeoPlanet and Placemaker and providing the geo heavy lifting for Flickr and Fire Eagle.
I speak at a wide range of conferences and blog as regularly as possible on location, places, maps and other facets of geography at www.vicchi.org and you can find me on Twitter as @vicchi.
Writing Usable APIs in Practice
Explicitly or implicitly, when working on complex systems, end up designing some APIs to accomplish their tasks, either because the product itself is some kind of general purpose library or because they need to write some libraries and packages to put some common code of their applications.
There is plenty of information available about how to write clean and maintainable code, but not a lot about writing usable APIs. The two things are related, but they are not the same. In fact, clean code is code that is clean from the point of view of its maintainers, usable APIs, on the other hand, refer to code that programmers (other than the original author) find easy to use. We'll see how usable APIs help in writing clean code (and vice-versa).
Giovanni is an independent consultant, coach, trainer, architect, and developer specialised in helping companies and teams to become more effective at producing and delivering high quality software.
He is a frequent conference speaker, and has been involved with the organisation of several international conferences. He is a past Conference Chair of the London XPDay, and of the ACCU.
Giovanni contributed two chapters to the book “97 Things Every Programmer Should Know” published by O’Reilly.
You can find more about him in his company web-site, and in his personal one.
The 90 minute Guide to Agile – What, Why, How
Allan is London based and works for Software Strategy where he provides training and consulting in Agile practices and bespoke development services. He specialises in working with software product companies, aligning company strategy with products and processes. In addition to numerous journal articles and conference presentations he is the author of 'Business Patterns for Software Developers' (2012) and 'Changing Software Development: Learning to become Agile' (2008). He is also the originator of Retrospective Dialogue Sheets.
In this very accelerated introduction to Agile Allan Kelly will attempt to explain What Agile is, Why companies are adopting it in increasing numbers and How it works. He might even give some suggestions on how to start your Agile initiative and why doing things right is more important than doing the right thing.
Liz is an experienced Lean and Agile coach, trainer, blogger 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 systems 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'.
BDD is a technique for helping team members collaborate and discover requirements in their project. It uses examples to illustrate the intended behavior of systems before they're implemented, so that the team can discover more examples and develop a shared understanding of the requirements. In this talk Liz will show why conversations are the most important aspect of BDD, how examples can help you discover things early, and why discovery is an inevitable part of software development.
Benjamin is a London-based Lean / Agile consultant and coach. He helps teams and managers consistently deliver even in challenging situations. He has a special focus on increasing learning in organisation by helping them develop productive communication skills that lead to better quality decision making. He is a highly-rated international conference speaker.
Developing iOS Apps for Fun and Profit
Is it worth developing for mobile platforms? If so why pick iOS?
What does a developer new to iOS need to know? What are the keys to building a successful app that will actually make money and be fun to write? This talk will walk you through the landscape, from the idiosyncrasies of Objective-C to how to test a mobile app to getting an app on the app store and getting it noticed.
That's a lot to cover in a short time - so come with an open mind and expect to have some fun.
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 paid contract work, consulting, training and coaching he has authored open source projects such as CATCH (a C++ & Objective-C test framework) and iPhone apps such as the strategy game, vConqr. He's been an increasingly semi-regular speaker at conferences and events.
Breaking News and Breaking Software
The Guardian publishes around 350 articles of content a day. Hardly 'big data'. We deal with barely 150 million users a month. Facebook (with it's 600 million users on mobile alone), we ain't. But we do have to serve the news, and we do have to serve it fast, accurately, and on time, across multiple platforms and devices.
For a company that's 192 years old, we like to think we're pretty Agile. So what do our development teams care about? What kind of qualities are we optimising for in our software and processes? How do we make sure that when the news is breaking, our software isn't broken? Or if it is, how do we fix it fast?
Andy is frontend architect at the Guardian in London where he works across a range of digital products. With a background in client-side web development he has worked as a lead engineer on Bing Maps, and as a consultant at Clearleft for clients ranging from the BBC and Channel 4 to Mozilla and Gumtree.
Data modeling is hard, especially in the world of distributed NoSQL stores. With relational databases, developers have tended to store normalized data and shape their query model around that structure. This can come back to bite you when it comes time to scale, as complex queries across dozens of tables begin to affect application performance. It’s common to find developers rethinking their data model as query latency increases under load.
With NoSQL stores, developers must consider their query patterns from the outset of application development, designing their data model to fit those patterns. A number of techniques, new and old, can be used to allow for maximum performance and scalability.
Topics covered will include: De-normalization, time boxing, conflict resolution, and convergent & commutative replicated data types. Additionally, discussions of common query patterns in light of the capabilities of various NoSQL data stores will be reviewed.
Ian Plosker is a Database Expert from Basho Technologies, the makers of the open source database Riak. He has been developing software professionally for 10 years and programming since childhood. Prior to working for Basho, he developed everything from CMS to bioinformatics platforms to corporate competitive intelligence management systems. At Basho, he's been helping customers be incredibly successful using Riak.
08:30 - Registration
09:30 - Keynote: Kevlin Henney
10:45 - Break
12:30 - Lunch
15:00 - Break
12:30 - Lunch
15:00 - Break
15:15 - Benjamin Mitchell
Kanban16:45 - Break
17:00 - Ian Plosker (Basho Technologies)
17:30 - Endnote: Sean Phelan
18:30 - Finish
19:30 - Dinner at The Library (Ticket Only)
Following directly after SyncConf on Friday 15th February The speaker’s dinner is your chance to get to know the speakers. It will be hosted at local Norwich restaurant The Library from 7.30pm.
During the course of the meal the speakers will remain seated at their table while the delegates move around between courses. This is a unique opportunity and experience.
The dinner price includes three courses and two glasses of wine all for only £39!.
Open Venue is in a grade II listed building situated in the heart of Norwich on Bank Plain. Formally the Barclays Bank Regional Headquarters, Open now is home to OPEN Youth Trust and delivers youth programs in Arts, Media, Sports, Politics, Training and more. It also is one of Norwich's largest conference venues.
Norwich's Tech + Startup Community. Bringing Norwich's Developers & Entrepreneurs together. SyncNorwich is the most active Tech Meetup.com group within 100 miles of London and is East of England's biggest Tech community. Currently has over 330 members and is growing by the day.
Meet the team: Paul Grenyer and John Fagan, or Email us.
