I thought I’d share a little good news with all our friends and followers this afternoon. I’m happy to announce that InnerWorkings was named a winner of the prestigious annual Bersin Learning Leaders award.  We made our mark in the “Vendor Innovation” category and everyone here is very proud of the accolade, needless to say!

In a world where “astroturfing” or fake product reviews are more common that most web users realize — check out the latest scandal where Belkin’s CEO issues an apology for the shady work of an overzealous employee — it’s nice to get a genuine award that recognizes our hard work in bringing InnerWorkings Developer to market.

Of course, we’ve been saying the product is highly innovative for years (!) but it’s always fun to see some external validation of our unique approach to helping developers learn by doing. Most people remark on our rules-based code judging engine as the most innovative element, but we’ve also pushed the boat out in terms of our SaaS deployment, executive learning dashboards, and web-mediated customer support.

Nor does it stop there — we’re constantly looking at new ways to add value to the software organization and support professional developers who make the wheels go around. With your help and feedback, I’m hoping we’ll be back next year to win another learning award for an innovation yet to be hatched.

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Performance is a widespread term in our everyday lexicon — people have come to expect immediate results and punish poor performance at every turn. From cars to athletes to local schools, almost everything is measured in the context of “high performance”.

Until recently, terms like “high performance fund” and “top-performing stock” were bandied about by over eager finance pundits on every network TV channel. Today you’re more likely to hear terms like “bail out”, “credit crunch” and “economic meltdown” –  all because of poor performance in the housing and financial sectors!

But what about our world of enterprise software applications? Can the same demand for high performance be said to exist as developers build and deliver software applications? We know that it’s easy to overlook application performance in the rush to craft feature-rich software solutions; failing to test your solution’s performance under stress is a fundamental oversight, but many developers simply aren’t well versed in the skills of optimizing application performance.

Every time we survey our user base about what developer skills are most important, we get flooded with requests for training on application performance and optimization. Not likely to turn a deaf ear to such requests, we have released the following Drill to address key application performance issues:

• Improving Performance in .NET Framework Applications (3 hours)

Intended for intermediate developers and above, this Drill provides tips and techniques for optimizing the performance of your precious .NET applications. It contains lots of performance-related goodies to help your application shine in the eyes of its users:

• measure application performance
• create a custom generic cache to improve the performance of a Windows Forms application
• split a long computation into smaller sub tasks
• reuse objects that are expensive to create or frequently created
• defer the execution of expensive calculations until they are required
• improve performance with AJAX service calls and CSS Sprites

Have you got other suggestions for learning content on the intricacies of improving .NET application performance? If so, let us know as we’d really like to hear about them.

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The organizers of my beloved Swedish conference have released the full video of my Agile Tales presentation. The audience appears to be really quiet, but it is purely because the audio comes from my “Britney Spears”-style microphone only. In other words, people laughed at my silly jokes, honest!

Last week, I also presented at the Irish Java Technology Conference and I really enjoyed the brief discussion afterwords.
We talked about styles and the role of stories in technical presentations. I read about 50-60 books on screenwriting and creative nonfiction in the last few months. I know things now that I would have never suspected even just a couple of months ago. 
My thoughts on the matter are in continuous evolution, and I keep finding pleasant surprises at every corner.

I’ll be discussing some of those ideas at Jimmy Nilsson’s Software Architecture Workshop in Austria at the end of this month and, soon or later, I will write something here.

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