It’s awards season in the worlds of cinema and music, but what about in the world of geeks? Not to be outdone by Oscar and Grammy—and always stalking the latest celebrities around Microsoft, the JobsBlog crew tracked down three real award winners … the champs of Windows Phone’s employee-only application building content. We asked about the inspiration behind their winning masterpieces.

The trophy: Best app

And the award goes to: Nikolai Faaland, Sr. Software Engineer, Bing Mobile

The app:  Draw!, which includes a rich feature set that allows for finger drawing, special effects, and loading images from the phone or the camera

The inspiration: “I don’t typically write a lot of code on my own time.There’s a lot more to my life than code and work, so when I do it, there’s usually some specific thing in my own life that I want to accomplish. 

Draw! started as an app for the Zune HD, because at the time the Zune didn’t have a drawing app and I wanted one just to entertain my kids. When Windows Phone 7 came out and I saw that I could use C# and Silverlight, I thought ‘that’ll be fun’ and so started working on it.

It’s still really for my kids. They’re the ones that asked for all the features and found all the bugs, and my big ‘yeah that was worth it’ moment came from my daughter taking the final version and playing quietly on the couch with it for an hour, running up to me now and again and happily showing me what she had done.  That’s my inspiration.” 

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