Categories
MVP News

MVP Spotlight: Jordi Corbilla

Jordi CorbillaThis week I wanted to spotlight Jordi Corbilla of London, UK in our Embarcadero MVP Spotlight. Jordi has a fantastic blog Random thoughts on coding and technology where he has some recent posts on working with KinveyParse and BaaS in general.

Beyond BaaS, Jordi is interested in Databases and Artificial Intelligence. He has a GibHub project that contains a series of A.I. Algorithms programmed in Delphi. He also has a Distributed Decision-Making System and a Natural AI in Python. I was also looking at his 2D Physics Engine, but that isn’t necessarily AI related.

Jordi SelfieIn addition to amazing programming skillz, Jordi is also a photographer. I fancy myself a photographer, but it is just a little hobby for me. I tried a selfie similar to his at the left a long time ago, but it didn’t come out as well (I doubt I still have it).

Jordi is a pretty amazing photographer. I rather like this photo (mostly for the subject matter) . . .

Spartan.

But he has a lot of other great photos on his Flickr and Facebook.

Categories
MVP News

MVP of the Week: Germán Estévez

German Estevez RuizThis week I am spotlighting Germán “Neftalí” Estévez from Barcelona, Spain. He is a regular contributor on the ClubDelphi forms, which he also administers. You can also find him on Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow Netfalí

But I want to highlight a couple of his recent blog posts which can be found at neftali.clubdelphi.com and althought he’s started blogging on community.embarcadero.com too. His blog posts are in Spanish, but Google Translate takes care of most the heavy lifting, and his code samples are in the common Delphi.

Managing Audio on Android

This is a great guide to managing the hardware on Android. It shows how to work directly with the Audio Manager via the Java bridge. This is also useful if you are not familiar with using Android APIs directly.

The NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day

This is something I’ve thought about doing in the past. The APOD is a great new photo everyday. Turns out they have a web service you can use to access that picture. Germán shows how to access the web service, then download and display the pictures.

One thing I like is he includes short videos with many of his blog posts, as well as source code download.

Embarcadero MVP

Categories
MVP News

MVP of the Week: Alister Christie

LearnDelphi.TVAlister Christie of New Zealand is our MVP of the Week. Alister is the master of Delphi video trainings with his site at LearnDelphi.tv. He has over 100 free videos, and then over 30 more hours of premium videos. A great resource for people new to Delphi development, or anyone who wants to take their skill to the next level.

When I was in New Zealand I got a chance to sit down with Alister and Damien Bootsma for a short interview.

Alister has a lot of great content on his YouTube channel, including more interviews and technical trainings. Here are a few of his recent CodeRage sessions for you to check out too.

Flexible and Supercharged Key Hashing with TDictionary
TDictionary in Delphi is an extremely useful container, however the default method by which your ‘keys’ get hashed might be undesirable. Being able to alter this can give you far greater flexibility when taking advantage of the Generic Dictionary collection.

Common Delphi Coding Anti-Patterns
During this session you’ll either be thinking “I do that” (and hopefully you’ll stop) or “I remember doing that” (while cringing at the memory). There are certain coding patterns that all Delphi programmers seem to use at some stage – some of them sub-optimal, some weird, and some just plain wrong. Collectively I’ve called them Anti-Patterns, and in this session you’ll get to see some of my favorites (or, anti-favorites).

Escaping the Try..Finally..Free Nest
We all want to do the right thing with memory management and make sure we tidy up after ourselves. However as our code gets buried in successive layers of object allocation, try, finally, free “nests” it all becomes a bit onerous and, well, resembling a pterodactyl nest. In this session, we look at a technique to flatten out your code so that it will look less attractive as habitation for a friendly pterosaur, and as a side benefit, improve readability. Along the way we use interfaces, generics and anonymous methods to build our over-engineered object de-allocation artifice.

Become Your Own Art Department
Finding suitable and consistent images for buttons, menus and splash screens can be a difficult task – why not make your own?

Alister is a brilliant developer and great instructor. He always does great work. We are very pleased to have him as our MVP of the week.

Categories
MVP

More New MVPs

I’ve got another large group of MVPs that have just signed up. They will appear in the MVP directory soon, but until then you can discover more about them here:

For those of you keeping count, that puts the total number of MVPs over 100.

Categories
MVP News

MVP of the Week: Nirav Kaku

Nirav KakuThis week we are spotlighting our MVP Nirav Kaku from Mumbai, India. I had the opportunity to meet Nirav while I was visiting Mumbai and he showed me around India and took me to dinner.

One of the places we visited was Banganga Tank and one of the temples in the Walkeshwar Temple Complex. It was a great experience.

Banganga Tank

diyas at Banganga Tank Banganga Tank  Banganga Temple shikhara

Nirav runs a software development company in India where he employes 6 other Delphi developers. They provide a software as a service system to the high end corporate taxi service. It includes both mobile and web based aspects, all developed with Delphi (with a little HTML, JavaScript and PHP mixed in). It currently services a fleet of 1000 taxis and their drivers. For the back end they use both DataSnap and the Delphi MVC framework. Here are a couple of his developers I met while I was visiting.

Nirav's Developers

As an MVP and profession software developer he spends a lot of time researching technology and development topics, and then holds one day training sessions where he shares some of what he’s learned.

Nirav Kaku

[Download]

Categories
MVP News

MVP of the Week: Bertie Buitendag

Bertie BuitendagThis 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!

Categories
MVP News

MVP of the Week: Nick Hodges

Nick HodgesI 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.

AthenaIn 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.

Coding In Delphi  More Coding In Delphi

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

Nick Hodges 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.

Categories
Audio podCast MVP News podcast Video podCast

MVP of the Week: Yilmaz Yörü

Dr. Y?lmaz YörüThis week’s MVP spotlight is on Dr. Yilmaz Yörü from Eskisehir-Turkey. He graduated from the department of Mechanical Engineering of Eskisehir Osmangazi University in 1997. He received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the same department/university. Some of his interests are Programming, Thermodynamics (Exergy), Fluid Mechanics and Artificial Intelligence. He also likes graphical design and high-end innovations.

Video slide show . . .

Screenshots

DISS_HeatPumpSystem AnaBilge_Oyun3 AnaBilge_Analiz AnaBilge_Oyun1 EYO1_Okullar PumpX DusX PhenofNS XMPro_Satislar

Categories
MVP News

MVP of the Week: Danny Wind

DannyWindThis week we are highlighting Delphi and InterBase MVP Danny Wind. He is an experienced Delphi trainer, consultant and developer for the Delphi Company. He specializes in FireMonkey, User Interfaces and Threading. Danny is also a regular speaker at Developer Days, at SDN conferences, and Delphi launch events in the Netherlands or Belgium, as well as the Delphi training days in the Netherlands. Virtually he is a frequent presenter at our CodeRage online virtual conference, and is regularly blogging.The Delphi Company

You can follow Danny on Twitter, YouTube or LinkedIn. Look forward to a podcast episode with Danny soon as well.

Categories
Audio podCast MVP News podcast

MVP of the Week: Robert Love

Robert LoveThis week we are highlighting the work of Robert Love, MVP. I had the pleasure of meeting Robert around the release of Delphi 6. A coworker and I drove from Boise, Idaho down to Salt Lake City, Utah for the launch event (since there wasn’t one in Boise that year). Robert Love runs the Salt Lake Delphi Users Group, and they scheduled a User Group meeting the night of the launch event, so we stayed for that too.

BlogTwitter | Facebook | G+ | LinkedIn | Stack Overflow

Robert Love's Team Members - State of Utah
Robert Love’s Team Members at the State of Utah

He leads a team of Delphi developers that work for the state of Utah.

Some components they use there:

He is a top 4% contributor on Stack Overflow, having earned the silver Delphi badge. He also contributes to open source Delphi libraries (DunitX, Abbrevia, etc.), speaks at conferences and is a regular presenter for CodeRage.

At home he is in the middle of remodeling his house and working with his kids to add Arduinos and Raspberry Pi to automate everything. When he isn’t programming, Robert competes in competitive dutch oven competitions and volunteers for Boy Scouts of America. He is also an accomplished photographer.

Robert is also working on a replacement for the Component Development Kit that he is planning to make available via open source. I am really looking forward to this IDE add-in. For those that don’t remember, Component Development Kit was an IDE add-in by EagleSoftware back in the Delphi 6 days that walked you through the creation of components. It took Delphi’s simple component development process and made it really powerful.

Robert Love taking pictures at Dutch Oven Event
Robert Love taking pictures at Dutch Oven Event
Robert Love in mountains over house
Robert Love in mountains over his house
Robert Love's Daughter's First Electronics Project
Robert Love’s daughter’s first electronics project
Dutch Oven Cinnamon Rolls - Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)
Dutch Oven Cinnamon Rolls – Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)
Dutch Oven Chicken - Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)
Dutch Oven Chicken – Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)
Dutch Oven Rolls - Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)
Dutch Oven Rolls – Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)
Dutch Oven Cake - Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)
Dutch Oven Cake – Photograph by Robert Love (prepared by someone else)