Last week I had the pleasure of presenting at the annual Ský Development Conference (Hugbúnaðarrástefna Ský) in Reykjavík, Iceland. This year's conference theme was "The Work Environment of Software Developers". The conference offered presentations on the following topics: Programming Languages, Quality Assurance, Issue Tracking, User Interfaces, Project Management, Databases and Data Warehousing. My presentation was under the Project Management topic, titled "Practical Tips for Software Development Leads". In it I tried to provide some practical tips to team leads and software development managers. Suggestions on such things as how to get the most out of your team, how to manage your time, how to use programming to help with your managerial duties, how to achieve continuous improvement and how to motivate developers. The conference was all in Icleandic, so unfortunately so are the slides. They are available on the conference web site and on Slideshare (mine).
I especially liked Ólafur Gauti Guðmundsson's presentation on the Play framework, which I have been playing with a bit and Stefán Baxter's presentation on NoSQL databases. Margrét Dóra also had a great talk on user interfaces, reminding us that "stupid users" are really our own fault, a result of poor user interface design. And Birna Íris Jónsdóttir had a good QA talk titled "It works on my machine!" where she took some shots at us programmers for all the lame excuses we provide when our stuff breaks! :) All in all a fun day and an enjoyable conference.