InnerWorkings Blogs

The team at InnerWorkings is constantly trading interesting blogs, editorials, research, and other goodies that reflect our collective interests. More often than not, these recommendations are directly relevant to our world of software development, .NET releases, or new learning methods. Occasionally, we’ll share stuff that is innovative or just plain interesting in its own right.

Today, Claudio directed us all towards a little gem of a site called Education Revolution that was all of the above - relevant, newsworthy, interesting, and right down our alley. In particular, I’d point you towards the Manifesto, which I really enjoyed reading (several times). Item 22 in the manifesto strikes a chord with me:

Learning is more important than Education
Wait, didn’t we say at the top that education is everything? Yeah…sort of. Education is what happens to you, but learning is what you actually do. Learning is an active process that implies engagement. Ultimately learning, not education, is what’s useful. We’re here to revolutionize education and the best way we know to revolutionize it is to kill it off entirely. Replace it with a world in which people learn. All the time. In new and creative ways. And have a blast doing so.

EXACTLY! That’s what we’ve been preaching at InnerWorkings for several years. You don’t become a truly skilled developer by sitting at the back of a classroom passively absorbing programming concepts and theoretical knowledge like some sort of brain sponge. You must get “engaged”, apply your knowledge, and learn by doing. That’s why our product (shameless plug for the free trial) hustles developers into Visual Studio, sets real coding challenges, and asks them to learn by writing code and getting insight through direct feedback. The InnerWorkings code checking engine makes all that happen, but the underlying principle (on which we founded the company) is very clear: we want to transform how software developers learn; we want them to learn by doing.

Of course there’s a place for contemplative study and reflection, but I think people spend way too long in this zone and often neglect the practical application of real skills. Not to beat the drum too loudly here, but I don’t believe that you become a great author just by reading the works of Samuel Beckett & James Joyce (spot the Irish bias). Certainly it’s necessary to read the greats and seek inspiration there, but in my experience the only way to become a better writer is to ‘pick up a pen’ and write. Experiment, join a creative writing group, submit work for review, blog plenty - whatever gets you writing will improve your skills.

To my mind, the same is true for writing code and building software; to be a skilled practitioner, you have to practice and hone your craft over the years. To quote an informed source at Education Revolution, “learning is what you actually do”. I couldn’t agree more.

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