InnerWorkings Blogs

I’m pleased to announce that InnerWorkings is supporting an upcoming Silverlight event in Dublin, home to our own R&D team. Before anyone hops on the BART, please note that I’m referring to Dublin, Ireland - not Dublin, Pleasanton!

This Silverlight event is scheduled for Thursday, September 27th at 19:30 PM in the Cineworld Complex on Parnell Street. Full event details can be found on the IrishDev site. You’ll be glad to hear that attendance is free but registration is required in advance. 

Martha Rotter, from the Microsoft Ireland Developer and Platform Evangelism group, will be speaking at the event. Best of luck, Martha! In addition, the event is being sponsored by MTUG in Dublin and supported by the IrishDev community, so many hands make light work.  

InnerWorkings decided to throw in 1 hour of free Silverlight learning to support developers at the event:

• Creating a simple Silverlight control (30 minutes)
• Using MediaElement & VideoBrush to control video content (30 minutes)

Unfortunately, I’ll be miles away in San Francisco, but Claudio Perrone (our CTO) will be attending - so feel free to ask him many tough questions about just how InnerWorkings gets the figs in the fig rolls. Have a great event, folks…

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We get a ton of product feedback from our free trial, evaluations, web buyers, and large customers. Fortunately, we built a comments and rating feature into the product in the early days so the flow of feedback that can be acted upon is ever present.

Occasionally, we’ll get an independent product review from a developer who got caught up in one of the above cycles and had some good exposure to the InnerWorkings product and overall learning methodology. One such developer is Peter Miller, a developer and consultant with Clarity Consulting.

Peter recently wrote an excellent blog about his personal experience using InnerWorkings Developer; I highly recommend that you take a look at what he had to say about us. Peter’s approach to the product and his very reasonable learning goals are bread and butter to most developers seeking to improve their skills in measurable ways.

For example, Peter expresses a natural affinity for “self-directed learning” which is quite common among software developers. He also thrives on the challenge of getting up-to-speed on a specific .NET technology that he’s had little exposure to in the course of his project work to date. In Peter’s case, he was tackling Windows Workflow Foundation for the first time and he wanted to reduce the “ramp-up time” in learning WF.

Peter wisely rails against the unrealistic expectation of becoming an “instant expert” in WF, however. His goals are much more grounded and similar to those of many developers using our product day-to-day. In effect, Peter simply wanted to “be able to come into a new development situation feeling comfortable working with the technology”. It is refreshing to see developers who just want to get better at what they do and are willing to invest time in their professional skills by staying educated about the latest .NET technologies.

Peter mentions several other things about the InnerWorkings product and training experience that match his learning style and project needs. I won’t waste your time by repeating the details, as he’s articulated what we set out to build with this product better than I can. Good luck to you Peter and thanks for your kind (unsolicited) words about InnerWorkings!

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Who said competition for customers was dead in the airline industry? I’ve noticed some clever innovations coming out of Virgin America Airlines recently, which would make you wonder if you’re on a plane or in a luxury spa:

• mood lighting to induce relaxation (nah, I’d rather be assaulted by ear-splitting flight announcements)
• color tinted windows to reduce daylight glare (what, the greasy & wonky plastic blind isn’t good enough for you?)
• black leather seats with 32″ of legroom (possibly designed by Ferrari)
• 9″ video screens (no more lame Meg Ryan & Sandra Bullock movies)
• Google Maps to check the location of your aircraft (let air traffic control worry about the other planes)
• games (including Doom, if you’re into that sort of thing)
• in-flight text messaging (I hope the pilot sets his IM status to BUSY)
• standard 110v plug at every seat (no exorbitantly priced adapters for the desperate few)
• USB ports to charge PDAs, cell phones (& countless useless gadgets)
• coming soon, broadband internet access at every seat!

Starting next year, the word is that Virgin America will be offering broadband internet access at every seat. Virgin America is working with AirCell to deliver ethernet and Wi-Fi access across its entire continental U.S. fleet. Now the purple mood light might remind some of their last trip to Amsterdam, but who can argue with wireless access in-flight? I would say “bring it on” but that might jinx it, so I’ll just wait patiently instead.

I believe that some of the other airlines (like American Airlines with AirCell) are working on Wi-Fi too, but nobody wins at marketing like Virgin so stand back and watch them take all the credit. To be fair, Air Canada has a terrific in-seat entertainment console that lets you watch old tennis classics, oblivious to your screaming infant in the next seat. But Wi-Fi would be a quantum leap forward and you’d never be bored on a flight again. Did I mention that Virgin America keeps its headquarters in San Francisco International Airport (SFO)? While the domestic terminal looks like a hotel lobby that time forgot, SFO International is pristine, less crowded, and very handy for anyone in the Bay Area or flying from the West Coast.

I do enjoy listing all the junkets above and many of these passenger-friendly features would make me consider flying Virgin more often. I’ve no doubt that Wi-Fi access will make a lot of frequent fliers change allegiance and drag the incumbent airlines into the fray faster. These are all good things that raise the bar on customer service for the flying public. But when push comes to shove, you really can’t beat a good novel and a glass of wine on a long flight. Purple lighting is optional in my book…

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There’s an old saying, “Practice makes perfect”. And, as you’re probably aware if you read this blog and you understand the InnerWorkings’ philosophy, the mantra we repeat over and over is “Practice, practice, practice”. So you’d probably think that we would automatically endorse that old saying.

But does practice always make perfect?

Not necessarily! Obviously, the more you practice something, the easier it will be for you to do. With constant practice, some skills become almost reflexive. But imagine that you learned the skill incorrectly in the first place. Or that, during your practice, bad habits crept in and then became ingrained through repetition. When this happens, practice certainly doesn’t make perfect.

Let’s say you’re learning how to play golf, and you find it difficult to drive the ball the required distance. You modify your swing, and then you practice and practice. Eventually you start to consistently achieve the required distance. But somewhere along the way you acquired some bad habits and now you find it difficult to consistently get the direction right. You’ve solved one problem but you’re stuck with another. Not so good!

Ideally you’d have had a golf pro on hand to periodically review your practice, give you feedback, and correct any faults creeping into your swing and grip. This would have prevented you from developing bad habits which are so hard to get rid of later.

One of the great things about programming is its flexibility. You can achieve a desired solution by writing code in many different ways. A competent programmer will write code in a certain way, while a really excellent programmer will write the code differently. Conversely, a poor programmer can still achieve the desired solution but may do so by writing inefficient, bug-ridden code that’s difficult to understand and maintain.

Not everyone can be a brilliant programmer. But one of the most important ways you can maximize your potential as a programmer is by adhering to good programming practices and avoiding bad ones.

The InnerWorkings developers are always careful to use good programming practices. For example, they make heavy use of refactoring, which improves and simplifies the code design without changing its functionality. This makes it easier for the learner to understand the code in the challenge, and encourages the writing of clean, straightforward code to meet the challenge’s requirements. Another example of good practice is the use of naming conventions that adhere closely to industry standards and Microsoft guidelines.

These are just two simple examples of good programming practices. We use many others to ensure that the code in InnerWorkings challenges is – as far as is practicable - readable, maintainable, reusable, modular, testable, and so on.

What’s more, hints are given in some challenges – when used, they often point to the better programming practice among several possible solutions.

This exposure to good programming practices means that when a learner successfully completes an InnerWorkings challenge, they won’t just have grasped the key learning objective of that challenge. They’ll also be more likely to use good programming habits when putting what they’ve learned into practice.

Yet another benefit of the InnerWorkings system!

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