Let’s start with an old-fashioned definition, shall we? According to Wikipedia, “HTML5 is a markup language for structuring and presenting content for the World Wide Web”. It was created as an open format unified markup language that can be written in either “XHTML or HTML syntax”.

Started in 2007, it’s clear that HTML5 is still an emerging specification and the W3C’s HTML5 Working Group has announced their intention to finalize HTM5 and make it fully interoperable by July 2014.

HTML5 really came to prominence in the mainstream media when Apple CEO Steve Jobs took a swipe at Adobe’s Flash technology in a letter titled Thoughts on Flash: “Flash is no longer necessary to watch video or consume any kind of web content” and “new open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win”.

How has HTML5 fared since this ringing endorsement from one of the luminaries of the technology world? Let’s break down its performance into three simple categories that any beer drinker/casual philosopher will appreciate — the glass half-full, the glass half-empty, and who is drinking the brew.

HTML5: The Glass Half-full

There are many positive features of HTML5 that aspire to the vision set out by Steve Jobs of “new open standards” on the web; check out this article titled HTML5 vs. Native Apps for a concise exploration of the pros and cons:

• Transformation of Web Forms (supports form validation, regular expressions, etc.)
• New API for audio and video (no need for third-party applications, like Flash)
• Canvas API element (displays data driven visuals with real-time image generation)
• User editable content (better descriptions of web page content)
• Geolocation API (maps the user location, for better or worse)

For a visual map of the HTML5 taxonomy and the status of emerging related technologies, check out this fancy illustration from Sergey Mavrody’s HTML5 & CSS3 Quick Reference book:

 HTML5: The Glass Half-empty

• Limited browser support (only “modern” browsers support HTML5 today)
• No native HTML5 animation  (CSS or JavaScript required)
• HTML5 lacks direct access to the entire file system (unlike a native app)

Who’s Drinking the HMTL5 Brew?

It’s not easy to get accurate adoption rates for HTML5, although there is no shortage of opinions out there about why it will (or won’t) succeed.

I recommend the following article titled HTML5: Current progress and adoption rates, which offers some solid business case insights into HTML5 adoption and the preference for native apps in some instances.

“There isn’t any question about the adoption of HTML5, it’s already the de facto standard,” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, in the press release announcing the findings of a study titled More Than 50% Developers Are Moving From Flash to HTML5.

“There is special strength in HTML5 for mobile and cross-platform mobile apps, which is the direction the industry is moving for client devices, and that has made it extremely attractive to developers everywhere in the world. We see the most strength in Asia, a region that is generally quick to adopt new technologies.”

According to a Binvisions report released on 30 September 2011, “34 of the world’s top 100 Web sites were using HTML5″ with adoption led by search engines and social networks.

HTML5 Developer Training

To add our signal to the noise of these adoption stories, InnerWorkings has seen tremendous interest in our developer training on HTML5-based Applications. This push for HTML5 training is strong across the board, both from individual developers who want to add to their marketable skills, and enterprise software teams building applications for the web.

Despite its current shortcomings and a lack of clarity about its future scope, it’s clear that HTML5 is a technology whose time has come.

Comments (and corrections) welcome as always.

There are so many reports and studies on software quality that you’d be forgiven for thinking that “Hello World!” is a bridge too far for many developers.

Lost in this sea of depressing data on software quality is the obvious conclusion that people, not tools or technologies, have the biggest impact on your code quality.

No matter how cutting-edge your development environment or software tools, your people are the arbiters of code quality and application performance.

It’s rare to find an article that cuts right to the chase in addressing the key issues surrounding software quality. Bola Rotibi has written an excellent piece titled Want Quality Software? Focus on People and Processes — Not Technology.

At InnerWorkings, we agree wholeheartedly with his assertion that people and processes (not technology and tools) have the greatest impact on your software lifecycle.

The fact is that no amount of tools and technology will help if your people don’t have the skills to use them effectively.

Learning and professional skills development are inextricably linked to better quality code with fewer defects.

Hiring new software developers is one of the most important software management responsibilities; there’s little else that carries the same impact on the output of your team’s development efforts.

Angelique Martin from 8th Light has written a terrific article titled 8 Things You Ought to Know About Hiring a Software Developer.

Her list includes delving into the following areas of software development when hiring a new developer for your team:

• development practices (TDD, pair programming, continuous integration)
• development process
• ongoing learning
• proof of talent
• project cost
• estimation skills
• meeting deadlines
• flexibility to change direction

Read 8 Things You Ought to Know About Hiring a Software Developer to see how your new hire practices stack up.

San Francisco, CA — October 18, 2011.

InnerWorkings announced a major addition to its Learning Platform today with the release of self-paced SharePoint 2010 training for professional developers and software teams.

Working in partnership with the USPJ Academy, InnerWorkings is offering world class SharePoint learning solutions to its customers. USPJA boasts a team of industry renowned SharePoint experts whose approach emphasizes the real-world aspects of learning SharePoint — a perfect fit with the InnerWorkings methodology.

InnerWorkings confirmed the immediate release of three SharePoint courses to its Learning Platform, covering the following topics:

• Beginning SharePoint Development
• SharePoint Data View Web Part Basics
• SharePoint Designer 2010 Workflow

Additional SharePoint courses are in development and will be released on a quarterly basis. All of the SharePoint courses include video-based instruction from USPJA experts, hand-picked e-books, and a virtual lab environment to practice important configuration tasks. In addition, a Live Guide feature connects developers and in-house SharePoint experts to facilitate ongoing support and grading of assignments.

“With over 100M users and $1B in revenue for Microsoft, SharePoint is the understated giant of Microsoft’s enterprise collaboration strategy”, said Francis McKeagney, InnerWorkings CEO. “As a server-based technology, SharePoint presents significant challenges to organizations wishing to provide deep, hands-on training to their software teams. We are really excited that our new offering addresses this issue in a rigorous and compelling way. The virtual lab capability, in particular, allows for deep learning in both generic and customizable setups. We are delighted to partner with USPJA to deliver such a comprehensive enterprise learning solution for SharePoint development teams. USPJA’s knowledge and expertise has made this offering possible.”

“The market for SharePoint developers has never been hotter”, said Bjørn Furuknap, USPJA CEO. “We’ve always been extremely confident in the depth and quality of our SharePoint learning solutions, but this partnership with InnerWorkings brings tremendous scale and reach to our efforts. Coupling the technical strength of our training with the online learning expertise and global audience of InnerWorkings is a winning combination. We are delighted to partner with InnerWorkings to offer our combined SharePoint learning services to a huge audience of SharePoint developers and teams hungry to succeed in their chosen area of domain expertise.”

About InnerWorkings
At InnerWorkings, our mission is to help our customers build great software organizations. We believe that it is possible to create a successful, efficient, and cost-effective software organization and sustain it over multiple projects. How do we do this? By providing software executives with an integrated platform to improve learning, collaboration, and software processes across your development teams. The company’s R&D facility is based in Dublin, Ireland and InnerWorkings maintains its corporate headquarters in San Francisco, California. For more information about InnerWorkings and its services, visit www.innerworkings.com.

We all want to measure our code metrics and gain insight that can be acted upon, right? Software development, like most engineering disciplines, is more than a little obsessed with tracking code metrics.

Do you obsess about metrics like bugs counts, lines of code, code coverage, and cyclomatic complexity? Well, this article by Andrew Binstock may give you some heart. Andrew makes the point that most code metrics used today are deeply flawed and broadly misused.

His article titled The Dismal Science of Code Metrics lays out an argument that metrics are only useful if you’re really clear about what numbers to measure and use consistent quantitative measurement tools as part of the process.

He also contends that many tools to measure defect counts are too closely linked to file size — as the application increases in size, so too does the associated defect count almost by default.

In the final analysis, Andrew recommends using “metrics that are straightforward, easy to understand, and that you can track easily”. That seems pretty obvious, but you’d be amazed by how many companies fail to follow this simple piece of advice when tracking code metrics.

Much has been said about the impact of HTML5 on web application development. In our most recent roadmap survey with InnerWorkings customers, HTML5 topped the list of requested training by a substantial margin.

You’ve spoken and we’ve listened. As a result, we’ve just released a comprehensive Learning Program on building HTML5 based web applications for .NET developers.

HTML5 is packed with rich features that your developers can take advantage of when building out their web apps.

Our developer training covers the following aspects of web development with HTML5:

• HTML5 elements and attributes
• graph display using JavaScript
• the canvas element
• browser history manipulation
• video and audio elements
• local and session storage
• running a Web application offline
• adapting a Web application to mobile devices

We’re excited about this new addition to our .NET training catalog.

If you’re interested in accessing our HTML5 training for your .NET team, please contact us with details of your .NET team’s learning needs. Happy coding.

Here’s a quick snapshot of our August 2011 developer newsletter - enjoy!

Object Oriented Training Offer

We’re offering a 50% discount on our highly popular Object Oriented Techniques training. Regularly priced at $299, you’ll learn to create robust, efficient, and maintainable object-oriented applications for just $149:

• Object Oriented Techniques — C# Training ($149)
• Object Oriented Techniques — VB Training ($149)

Visit our web catalog and use the code IWOOP50 to claim your savings. Please note that this offer expires on August 31, 2011.

Are Developers Always the Last to Know?

Sebastian Holst has written an excellent article for Visual Studio Magazine titled Why Is the Developer Always the Last to Know? Successful development is measured at the point where an application and its users meet. Application analytics help to capture raw data for analysis, but your development organization must be able to turn this analysis into tangible action. This article explores how many software teams overlook user driven development by failing to map clear objectives and data requirements.

How Facebook Ships Code

There’s no shortage of articles about Facebook these days, but I suggest you read this interesting take on How Facebook Ships Code. According to the author, over 50 percent of Facebook employees reside in the Engineering or Operations groups today and the Product Manager to Engineer ratio is 1:10 or thereabouts. Can Facebook continue to maintain its “developer driven culture” as the company expands at a rapid pace? Certainly, Google has set the precedent in this regard, hanging onto its developer oriented culture over the years in the face of staggering growth and expansion.

.NET Training Catalog

With 600+ hours of developer training in our unique self-paced format, the InnerWorkings .NET training catalog is a goldmine of .NET skills. Check out some of our newest releases like .NET 4.0, Enterprise Library 5.0, and ADO.NET Entity Framework — you’re sure to find some area of .NET development that is on your list of new skills to master. Check it out.

Here’s a quick summary of the latest news and offers from InnerWorkings - enjoy!

Free Diagramming Control from Syncfusion

I’m delighted to announce that Syncfusion is offering InnerWorkings developers a hot new diagramming control called Essential Diagram for ASP.NET MVC built on HTML5. Sign up for your free license now and start creating rich, highly interactive diagrams that work on any device. Now you’ve got every reason to build stunning diagrams in your next .NET app!

Your Next Job: Mobile App Developer?

Some call it the looming ‘gold rush’ for software developers, but is there really that much interest in mobile apps these days? Beth Stackpole’s excellent article titled Your Next Job: Mobile App Developer argues that there’s a distinct lack of mobile development talent which represents a huge opportunity for developers considering a career makeover. It’s true that building for mobile apps requires a whole new skillset and mindset, but the opportunities could be enormous for developers who make the early move.

.NET 4.0 Training

Take your .NET skills to the next level with our hands-on .NET 4.0 Training. You’ll learn new coding skills in MVC, C# 4.0, Silverlight 4.0, Enterprise Library 5.0 and more. Regularly priced at $299, enjoy a 1 year subscription to deeply technical training in all these key technologies for just $199. Visit our web catalog and use the code IWVS2010 to claim your savings — offer expires on Monday, August 15th, 2011:

• .NET 4.0 Training with Visual Studio 2010

Sammamish, WA and San Francisco, CA - June 30, 2011 - ArtinSoft Corporation and InnerWorkings today announced a partnership that will result in a comprehensive offering aimed at accelerating customer migration to the Microsoft .NET platform.

InnerWorkings, a global software company that delivers a hosted.NET learning platform, allows software managers to train their programmers and evaluate skills acquisition. Their truly “hands-on” learning environment provides real experience writing code while learning new .NET technologies, all on a platform that has been tested, used, and validated by over 200,000 developers and thousands of corporations worldwide.

ArtinSoft possesses a unique automated conversion technology and years of experience in .NET migration projects for hundreds of enterprise customers around the world. Their solution helps companies move away from an unsupported platform, preserving an application’s capital investment while reducing development, maintenance and deployment costs and breaking scalability and future evolution constraints.

Focusing on software migration, InnerWorkings and ArtinSoft found perfect compatibility between their respective solutions and customer needs.

“Through this strategic partnership, both companies can now extend their offerings with substantial added value, not only migrating software applications but also updating the skill sets of the teams in charge of those systems”, noted Roberto Leiton, ArtinSoft CEO. “We are definitely excited to have InnerWorkings as a partner, foreseeing great benefits for clients looking to achieve a complete, fast and risk-free migration to .NET”.

“InnerWorkings has long searched for a meaningful .NET migration partner with a reputation for delivering rigorous, enterprise class software migrations,” said Francis McKeagney, InnerWorkings CEO. “ArtinSoft Corporation is such a partner, and we’re confident that our combined offering of best-in-breed .NET migration tools alongside world-class .NET learning will be a winning combination for our shared customer base.”

About ArtinSoft

With over fifteen years of experience, ArtinSoft has proven to be a key player in software transformation, by allowing customers from all over the world to ensure business continuity and compliance through migration solutions and developer tools. Created upon principles of artificial intelligence and a relentless passion for innovation, the company is now the de-facto leader in the VB6 application renewal space, holding an unparalleled record of real world migration projects while in constant growth through a strategic partner network. ArtinSoft’s solutions enable organizations to leverage years of intellectual and financial investment in the most cost-effective way. Furthermore, not only can its products be thoroughly customized, but also complemented with different training and technical support options. Visit www.artinsoft.com for more details.

About InnerWorkings
InnerWorkings provides a coding sandbox, integrated learning platform, and executive dashboard to improve developer skills across your software organization. Used by over 200,000 developers and many Fortune 500 companies worldwide, our learning solution is designed to help software teams of all sizes build great software on the .NET Framework. Visit www.innerworkings.com for more details.

The software industry has moved from a dogged recession in 2008, to talent wars amongst the major Business Process Outsourcers (BPOs) and System Integrators (SIs) as they struggle to attract the best and brightest to their workforce.

Any number of metrics is being employed to ensure that software organizations attract the right candidates to blend in with their company culture and strategic business objectives. These metrics include everything from time to hire, interview to hire, industry diversity, people diversity, hire source, and so on.

Many companies have fine tuned their hiring process to lower costs associated with recruitment and align hiring expenses with business priorities.

Despite the many sophisticated models employed to hire the right people, demands for talented employees exceeds the supply. This leaves many organizations wondering what strategies to adopt to ensure that they can retain and even expand their workforces to maintain competitive advantage.

One thing is certain — if you want your organization to stay ahead of the skills curve, you have to invest in developing existing talent.

In software development, maintaining skill levels isn’t easy or scalable. For most companies, it involves multiple sources of learning and professional development to get the right mix. For instance, while InnerWorkings focuses on improving developer skills, our partners at the International Association of Software Architects help companies to achieve excellence in architectural tools and industry best practices.

If you think you don’t need to care about improving the capabilities of your current engineers, you should check out the 2010 CAST Worldwide Application Software Quality Study. CAST puts a number on the cost of fixing code quality; basically you can expect to spend $1,000,000 fixing errors for every 340,000 lines of code created.

With this kind of financial incentive, you can significantly improve your operating margins by introducing effective performance-based training initiatives that develop existing talent and enable developers to apply techniques in difficult or unusual situations.

It’s all fine and dandy hiring in the best talent, but if you’re interested in bottom line impact of talent development for your software teams, we’d love to hear from you.