Author: Jim McKeeth

This week we are spotlighting the work of Bertie Buitendag, our MVP from South Africa. He is a lecturer at Tshwane University of Technology. He was instrumental in the school system adopting Delphi for early education. He also worked to develop the curriculum for teaching computer programming in basic education.

If you check out his blog, he regularly blogs about educational events in South Africa where students and faculty learn more about Delphi. If you check out his YouTube Channel you can see some of the videos he’s put together covering different topics on Delphi.

You can also see Bertie and some of his students from South Africa in the recent Inspire, Develop, Excel video.

If you are interested you can check out the Implementation Plan for Standardising Programming Language for Information Technology for 2015 that provides the argument for using Delphi in schools. It provides a lot of great points.

It was unfortunate that a few schools insisted on staying on Java, but most of them are now standardized on Delphi thanks to Bertie!

I feel like I’ve known Nick Hodges as long as I’ve been using Delphi. He is as much a part of the Delphi community as anyone else, especially with the distinction of writing the first 3rd party component for Delphi: TSmiley. I believe Nick was also an original member of TeamB, moderating the forums, and wherever there is a conversation about Delphi, you will probably find him there.

In 2004 Nick won the Spirit of Delphi Award, a very prestigious honor in the Delphi community. I was at BorCon that year, but I knew Nick previously from the TDAG mailing list I frequented. I even snagged a photo of Nick receiving the award, but the camera on my Sony PDA didn’t do it justice (I’ve since lost both).

In 2006 Nick joined DevCo (as it was then called) as the Delphi product manager. This was during that transition period between Borland and Embarcadero. The company was DevCo for a short period of time, then became CodeGear. Nick later went on to run R&D at Embarcadero.

While at Embarcadero Nick hosted his own podcast The Delphi Hour. You can still find an archive of the episodes on the Delphi Wiki. Nick is also a top contributor there, a great resource about the Delphi community.

After leaving Embarcadero (around 2012) he was famously in a commercial for the Gateway Ticketing (where he was their product manager) that was a satire of the Intel commercial with Ajay Bhatt. Unfortunately I can’t find a copy of the commercial anywhere. It was amazing. Imagine it just like the original Ajay Bhatt commercial, but with Nick Hodges, and then at the end everyone is chasing him down the street.

Nick was my guest for the 2nd episode of my Podcast, back in 2008, and returned a few more times as a fairly regular guest. I just listened to that 2nd episode again, and I had a lot of fun with sound effects. Need to do some more of that in the future.

Recently Nick has released two fantastic books on Delphi development. One great thing about these books is they aren’t just about the fundamentals of Delphi development, like so many other books out there. Instead they are about how to take your development to the next level. Great books for all Delphi developers out there. I believe Nick might be working on a new book, but no word for sure.

Nick is regularly presenting in person and online. He recently returned from presenting at the DAPUG meeting in Denmark.

You can catch some of Nick’s online presentations too . . .

I’m sure even with all that I’ve covered in this blog post, I’ve just scratched the surface of Nick’s contributions to the Delphi community. Thanks Nick for all you do!

Stay tuned for another podcast with Nick in the near future.