troubalex

Time is money

Or: Understanding ROI for software people

Abstract

Most of us work on products that the companies employing us need to sell to someone to survive. Yet, we often don't have a clue what that really means while at the same time, we are expected to make good choices when it comes to prioritising our work.

Terms like "value creation" and "return on investment" are thrown around regularly in discussions but they are hard to grasp, and mapping them to our day-to-day activities in product teams often feels impossible.

In this talk, I am going to pick apart what it means to think about our "investments" and the "returns" we can influence as software people, and attach them to tangible, everyday decisions we are all familiar with. 30 minutes later, attendees will have a much better idea why we should or shouldn't do everything we can, and how our decisions contribute to a company's bottom line.

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Keybase proof

I hereby claim:

• I am troubalex on github.
• I am troubalex (https://keybase.io/troubalex) on keybase.
• I have a public key ASBb5SIo3rSIJoHw2F4Nb6sF9T_afSxCUfh8B4mp1nYaHQo

To claim this, I am signing this object:

troubalex

Death by a thousand paper cuts – the user experience of complexity

All non-trivial software inevitably grows in complexity over time. Regardless of best intentions, with continuous releases of new functionality, design debt threatens to cripple our applications: they become confusing and increasingly hard to understand and use.

Alexandra shares stories from her design work on complex interfaces that taught her how to make sense of almost any mess.

About the speaker

Alexandra spent 10 years living big drama on opera stages before making her way into KDE and launching her tech career as community manager for Qt in Oslo. She is the founder and co-organiser of the Rails Girls chapter in Oslo, and a proud Web Rebel.

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ruby -r webrick -e'WEBrick::HTTPServer.new(:Port => 3000, :DocumentRoot => Dir.pwd).start'

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Meet our awesome Platinum Sponsor: GitHub

Hands up, who hasn't heard of GitHub? We probably won't see that many raising theirs. For those who are new to all these development details, here is what GitHub writes about themselves:

"GitHub is the best place to share code with friends, co-workers, classmates, and complete strangers. Over three million people use GitHub to build amazing things together."

What this really means is that more than three million people store their code in one place. This is neat because cooperation on projects suddenly becomes so much easier. You can search for projects, learn from other users' code, fix their bugs or finish their features. And you can do all of this without having to ask for write access to the repository first or sending patches via email.