Category: MVP

This 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 Kinvey, Parse 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.

In 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) . . .

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

This 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.

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.

This 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.

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.

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.

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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.